It’s often convenient to share a common glossary across many documents. If $glossary-collection points to a glossary, the stylesheets will automatically populate glossary entries in the document being transformed.

To achieve this:

1. Create a shared glossary and store it somewhere.

2. In the document you’re transforming, add an empty glossary with @role='auto'.

3. Run your transformation with $glossary-collection set to the URI of that document.

The stylesheets will copy referenced entries into your document before processing it.

You may specify per-document glossary collections with the db processing instruction using the glossary-collection pseudo-attribute. This must appear in the root element of your main document. If per-document glossary collections are provided, they are processed in the order provided before the global collection.

If multiple definitions for the same term appear in a glossary collection, only the first term is used.