5.9 List of Abbreviations

Another common kind of list is a List of Abbreviations. The thesis office seems to think that these should be formatted identically to other lists, even though they are not really contents lists. Because of this I have added a built-in environment {abbreviations} and a helper macro to add elements to the list. The basic idea is the following: for each abbreviation/symbol you add to the list use the command \abbrev{<abbreviation>}{<explanation>}. This command takes two arguments, the first being the abbreviation itself, and the second the explanation of the abbreviation. For example, for a list of abbreviations containing the abbreviations MSU and MIT we would use the following code. The list is not automatically sorted, so you need to add abbreviations with \abbrev in exactly the order you want them to appear in the list.

\begin{abbreviations} 
\abbrev{MIT}{Massachusetts Institute of Technology} 
\abbrev{MSU}{Michigan State University} 
\end{abbreviation}

5.9.1 Summary of abbreviation commands

In addition to the \abbrev command, there are a few other commands to change the format of the the \listofabbreviations as shown in Table 5. Note that the List of Abbreviations written to the auxiliary file with extension .lob which can be removed along with other .aux files if needed.