About This Fork
glossary2 is a fork of Lisa DeBruine’s glossary R package. DeBruine’s original design is elegant and thoughtfully crafted for adding interactive glossaries to Quarto and R Markdown documents. This fork addresses a critical bug in term matching.
Differences from Upstream
Term Matching: Exact Case-Insensitive Lookup
Problem: The original package used grep(term, names(gloss), ignore.case = TRUE) to look up glossary terms. This performed substring matching, causing serious bugs where: - Looking up “API” would incorrectly match “Capital income” - Looking up “alpha” would match “alpha (graphics)” - Any term could potentially match unintended entries
Solution: Replaced substring matching with exact case-insensitive matching. The key change in R/glossary.R (lines 75–81):
clean_term <- trimws(tolower(term))
clean_names <- trimws(tolower(names(gloss)))
index <- which(clean_term == clean_names)
if (length(index)) term <- names(gloss)[index[[1]]]This ensures term lookup is exact (no substring matches) while remaining case-insensitive.
Test coverage: - tests/testthat/test-glossary.R includes regression tests for exact matching, case insensitivity, and edge cases - inst/glossary.yml includes terms designed to catch substring-matching bugs (“API” vs “Capital income”, “alpha” vs “alpha (graphics)”)
Scope of Changes
Beyond the critical bugfix, the core functionality remains true to DeBruine’s original design.
Version Changes
| Aspect | Upstream (glossary) | Fork (glossary2) |
|---|---|---|
| Package name | glossary |
glossary2 |
| Version | 1.0.1 | 1.0.1 |
| Repository | https://github.com/debruine/glossary | https://github.com/petzi53/glossary2 |
| Maintained by | Lisa DeBruine | Peter Baumgartner |
License & Attribution
- License: CC BY 4.0 (unchanged from original)
- Original author: Lisa DeBruine
- Maintained by: Peter Baumgartner (since 2026)
- Copyright: Lisa DeBruine (original work)
All distributions of glossary2 maintain full attribution to DeBruine’s original work.
How to Contribute
Issues and pull requests are welcome. When submitting contributions:
- For bug reports: Please be specific about which terms/definitions trigger the issue
- For PRs: Keep changes focused; large refactors should be discussed in an issue first
- Attribution: Ensure commit messages and code comments reference the original work where relevant
Migration from glossary to glossary2
If you’re currently using the original glossary package, you can switch to glossary2 with:
# Remove old installation
remove.packages("glossary")
# Install glossary2
devtools::install_github("petzi53/glossary2")The API is identical; no code changes needed. All existing glossary files (YAML) and Quarto/R Markdown documents will work without modification.
Contact & Collaboration
If you have questions or suggestions:
- GitHub Issues: Open an issue at https://github.com/petzi53/glossary2/issues
- Pull requests: Feel free to submit PRs
If the original glossary maintainer (Lisa DeBruine) expresses interest in re-engaging with the package, I’m open to collaboration or transferring the fork back to her.
Last updated: 2026-08-20