Term Variant Guidelines

The Acrolinx Integrations can recognize small differences in the way a term looks in a document and how it looks in the the terminology section. This feature eliminates the need to enter minor variations of a term in the terminology section.

Term variants can fall into one of two categories:

Legal variants - A legal variant is a term variant with one or more of the following criteria:
- It’s allowed at the beginning of a sentence or in a title.
- It includes branding-related symbols such as ®, ©, or ™.
- It’s an exception configured in the term variant settings.
Illegal variants - An illegal variant is a term variant that you don't want to allow under most circumstances. The Acrolinx Integrations mark illegal variants as deprecated.

You can use the global term variant guidelines to prevent Acrolinx from highlighting generally allowed variants. Additionally, you can use the Advanced Information tab of a term’s Term Edit page to override a global variant guideline. You might want to do this in cases where you want Acrolinx to highlight a generally allowed variant for a particular term.

Acrolinx comes installed a standard set of term variant guidelines.

The following table explains the function of each global term variant guideline.

Name	Use
Flag variants	Turn all variant highlighting on or off for all terms. When you turn this setting off, Acrolinx ignores all term variant guidelines that you’ve activated globally or for a specific term. You can also use the Advanced information page to turn variant highlighting on or off for single terms.
Require uppercase at beginning of sentence	Highlight any term that appears at the beginning of a sentence but doesn't start with a capital letter. The correct form for a term at the beginning of a sentence is usually uppercase.
Allow title form anywhere	Allow the variant form that's used in titles to be written anywhere in a sentence. When you activate this guideline, the term can start with a capital letter for each word in any part of the sentence. Additionally, any special title forms that you’ve defined at term level are also allowed anywhere in a sentence. Use this guideline if Acrolinx highlights too many titles incorrectly. This behavior usually occurs when there are too many different title contexts for Acrolinx to identify. Tip The Acrolinx linguistic team configures the title context definitions during the setup of your guidance package. During the setup process, Acrolinx identifies any paragraph formats and XML elements that are part of a title in customer documentation.
Require uppercase after hyphen in titles	Require all words within hyphenated terms to have a first capital letter when in the title context.
Allow first word capitalized	Allow the form used at the beginning of the sentence to be written in any part of a sentence or document. This form is typically the first word of the term capitalized.
Allow hyphen between words	Allow a hyphen to be used within all terms.
Allow all uppercase	Allow the term to be written in all uppercase letters.
Strict morphosyntactic restriction	Only highlight inflections of the term when: the inflected form is a valid form of the Acrolinx part of speech. and the part speech used in the sentence matches the Acrolinx part of speech. For more information, see the topic Term Settings.

With the term variant guidelines on the advanced information tab of a term’s edit page, you can configure variant exceptions for individual terms and to override the global term variant guidelines.

Acrolinx comes with with a standard set of term variant guidelines.

The following table explains the function of each term variant guideline.

Name	Input	Use
Form at beginning of sentence	A single word, or a comma-separated list of words.	Define which variants to allow when they appear at the beginning of a sentence. If you don’t activate this guideline, Acrolinx allows the term to be written with a first capital letter when it's at the beginning of a sentence. Example: Term management Tip Acrolinx uses punctuation or XML segmentation to identify the beginning of a sentence.
Title form	A single word, or a comma-separated list of words.	Define which variants to allow when they appear in a title context. If you don’t activate this guideline, Acrolinx allows the term to be written with a capital letter for each word when it's in a title. Example: Term Management Tip The Acrolinx linguistic team configures the title context definitions during the setup of your guidance package. During the setup process, Acrolinx identifies any paragraph formats and XML tags that are part of a title in customer documentation.
Always flag this term variant	A comma-separated list of words.	Define which variants to highlight no matter where they are in the document. Example: term Management
Never flag this term variant	A comma-separated list of words.	Define which variants should never be highlighted no matter where they are in the document. Example: term management
Flag variants	On Off Use the Global Setting	Turn all variant highlighting on or off for a specific term. When this setting is off, Acrolinx ignores all term variant guidelines that you’ve activated globally or for a specific term.
Require uppercase at beginning of sentence	On Off Use the Global Setting	Highlight any term that's at the beginning of a sentence but isn’t in the correct form for the beginning of a sentence. The correct form for a term at the beginning of a sentence is usually uppercase.
Allow title form anywhere	On Off Use the Global Setting	Allow all variants that you’ve defined in the Title forms guideline to be written in any part of a sentence or document.
Require uppercase after hyphen in titles	On Off Use the Global Setting	Require all words within hyphenated terms to have a first capital letter when in the title context.
Allow first word capitalized	On Off Use the Global Setting	Allow the form used at the beginning of the sentence to be written in any part of a sentence or document. This form is typically the first word of the term capitalized.
Allow hyphen between words	On Off Use the Global Setting	Allow a hyphen to be used within the term.
Allow all uppercase	On Off Use the Global Setting	Allow the term to be written in all uppercase letters.
Strict morphosyntactic restriction	On Off Use the Global Setting	Only highlight inflections of the term when: the inflected form is a valid form of the Acrolinx dictionary part of speech. and: the part of speech used in the sentence matches the Acrolinx dictionary part of speech. For more information, see the topic Term Settings.

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