Abbreviations¶

Technical documentation often incurs the usage of many acronyms, which may need additional explanation, especially for new user of your project. For these matters, Material for MkDocs uses a combination of Markdown extensions to enable site-wide glossaries.

Configuration¶

This configuration enables abbreviations and allows to build a simple project-wide glossary, sourcing definitions from a central location. Add the following line to mkdocs.yml:

markdown_extensions:
  - abbr
  - attr_list
  - pymdownx.snippets

See additional configuration options:

• Abbreviations
• Attribute Lists
• Snippets

Improved tooltips¶

Sponsors only · insiders-4.15.0 · Experimental

When improved tooltips are enabled, Material for MkDocs replaces the browser's rendering logic for title attribute with beautiful little tooltips. Add the following lines to mkdocs.yml:

theme:
  features:
    - content.tooltips

Now, tooltips will be rendered for the following elements:

• Content – elements with a title, permalinks and copy-to-clipboard button
• Header – home button, header title, color palette switch and repository link
• Navigation – links that are shortened with ellipsis, i.e. ...

Usage¶

Adding tooltips¶

The Markdown syntax allows to specify a title for each link, which will render as a beautiful tooltip when improved tooltips are enabled. Add a tooltip to a link with the following lines:

[Hover me](https://example.com "I'm a tooltip!")

Tooltips can also be added to link references:

[Hover me][example]

  [example]: https://example.com "I'm a tooltip!"

For all other elements, a title can be added by using the Attribute Lists extension:

:material-information-outline:{ title="Important information" }

Adding abbreviations¶

Abbreviations can be defined by using a special syntax similar to URLs and footnotes, starting with a * and immediately followed by the term or acronym to be associated in square brackets:

The HTML specification is maintained by the W3C.

*[HTML]: Hyper Text Markup Language
*[W3C]: World Wide Web Consortium

Adding a glossary¶

The Snippets extension can be used to implement a simple glossary by moving all abbreviations in a dedicated file¹, and auto-append this file to all pages with the following configuration:

*[HTML]: Hyper Text Markup Language
*[W3C]: World Wide Web Consortium

markdown_extensions:
  - pymdownx.snippets:
      auto_append:
        - includes/abbreviations.md