Error when combining glossaries and label of description item

Question

I want to use the glossaries package and I want to be able to reference descritpion list items by their name. For the latter problem, I found a solution (Reference name of description list item in LaTeX , the accepted answer). This works fine. It is also no problem to incorporate glossary-entries into the text, however when printing the list of glossaries, this leads to an error.

My solution by now:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hyperref}
%%%
% Macro for description
\makeatletter
\let\orgdescriptionlabel\descriptionlabel
\renewcommand*{\descriptionlabel}[1]{%
    \let\orglabel\label
    \let\label@gobble
    \phantomsection
    \edef@currentlabel{#1}%
    %\edef@currentlabelname{#1}%
    \let\label\orglabel
    \orgdescriptionlabel{#1}%
}
\makeatother
\usepackage[toc,automake]{glossaries}
\makeglossaries
\newacronym{KG}{KG}{Knowledge Graph}
\begin{document}
\begin{description}
    \item[(A1)\label{desc:A1}] Test
\end{description}
As can be seen in \ref{desc:A1} a \gls{KG} is...
\printglossary[type=\acronymtype]
\end{document}

This works when either commenting out \printglossary[type=\acronymtype] or everything between makeatletter and makeatother.

The error message is:

Undefined control sequence.
\gls@start@measuring ...else \let \gls@org@target 
                                                  \glstarget \let \gls@org@l...
l.5         \setentrycounter[]{page}\glsnumberformat{1}}}

As I am not an expert on Latex, I would appreciate any help. I am open for all solutions enabling to achieve a combination of labels on items and the glossaries, they need not to be based on this code.

Doesn't glossaries by default use the description list to typeset its lists. Thus it does not like your redefinitions — daleif, Sep 04 '23 at 07:57

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 04 '23 at 09:30

You need to restore the original definition of descriptionlabel before \printglossary.

Meanwhile, I provided better code than yours for suppressing the \label inside the argument.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage[toc,automake]{glossaries}
%%%
% Macro for description
\makeatletter
\NewCommandCopy{\orgdescriptionlabel}{\descriptionlabel}
\renewcommand*{\descriptionlabel}[1]{%
    \phantomsection
    \begingroup\let\label@gobble\protected@edef\x{\endgroup
      \def\noexpand@currentlabel{#1}%
      \def\noexpand@currentlabelname{#1}%
    }\x
    \orgdescriptionlabel{#1}%
}
\makeatother
\makeglossaries
\newacronym{KG}{KG}{Knowledge Graph}
\begin{document}
\begin{description}
    \item[(A1)\label{desc:A1}] Test
\end{description}
As can be seen in \ref{desc:A1} a \gls{KG} is...
\RenewCommandCopy{\descriptionlabel}{\orgdescriptionlabel}
\printglossary[type=\acronymtype]
\end{document}

Note the use of \NewCommandCopy and \RenewCommandCopy that are a lot safer than \let (you need a fairly recent version of LaTeX). Also \protected@edef is better than \edef.

Error when combining glossaries and label of description item

1 Answers1