Does Commonmark support popup definitions for a word?

The Commonmark spec is enormous. I apologize I don’t have time to read the whole thing right now.

Part of my hobby is to convert PDF of scanned page images to reflowable EPUB text. These books are all at least 100 years old and some are from the 1700s. These old (British) books have a few words that Americans will not know about. I’d like to define a single definition for a word, and whenenver I mark up a word to define, the person can touch/click that word and a popup definition would appear for that word.

p.s. Sorry, I can’t seem to figure out how to add a category to this post after I’ve saved it initially.

You could use the HTML <dfn> element and write a post processing script to add the popup and the definition from outside of the document to each instance of the definition. There is currently no CommonMark equivalent of <dfn> and I’m not aware of any other Markdown versions of this tag either. But since HTML is valid CommonMark, the raw <dfn> tag may be used.

1 Like