Re: [Groff] moving TOC to start

[Jon Snader]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 08:11:53AM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
> 
> Uh, oh, I wasn't aware that you use this indeed very nasty strategy
> within pdfroff.  As Tadziu suggested in another mail, groff should
> behave like LaTeX (and I was incorrectly assuming that the ms macros
> already do something similar), this is, writing out the table of
> contents piece by piece into a separate file so that the created
> auxiliary file can be read in by a second pass at any location.  This
> not only fixes the nasty collation problem, it also fixes possible
> page numbering issues -- it even allows that the table of contents
> ends on the same page as the main body starts (this may be useful for
> mini TOCs which are located at the beginning of each chapter, listing
> the sections and subsections to come).
> 
> 

I do exactly what Werner is suggesting for my TOC, and it works
out very well.  My chapter and section macros write out title and
page information to a file.  This file is processed by a script
to generate exactly the type of TOC needed for the document in
question (rather than a one type fits all).  This does, of
course, take two passes, but so what?  The whole thing is
controlled by a makefile so I just type ``make book'' and
everything is taken care of automagically.  I also generate cross
references in a similar way, so I need a total of 3 passes, but
typesetting a 450 page book takes less than 30 seconds.

jcs