Re: [Groff] mom: Some follow-up questions

[Keith Marshall]

On Saturday 12 March 2005 6:59 pm, Jon Snader wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 11:17:45AM -0500, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 12, 2005, Jon Snader wrote:
> > > I do have cross reference macros that I use for my books.
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > > Peter, if you'd like to include them in mom or use them as a
> > > starting point, you're more than welcome--just let me know.
> >
> > Please, pass them along.
>
> Will do.  Give me a couple of days to do a minimal writeup on how
> to use them.  I call the two macros .Xr (a cross reference
> reference) and .Rf (a cross reference definition).  At a minimum,
> you'd probably want to change the names to be more in line with
> the macro names you use in mom.
>

If I may be so bold as to suggest, Peter, you may *not* wish to integrate 
such a capability too tightly into mom itself.

A cross reference capability is already defined within my pdfmark macro set, 
using `.pdfhref M ...' to mark a reference point, and `.pdfhref L ...' to 
refer to it, creating an active PDF link in the process.  Although I normally 
use ms for my routine formatting, I see no reason why mom should not be used 
as an alternative, for formatting PDF output, in which case the natural 
choice would be to employ pdfmark.tmac to handle cross references.

To achieve integration between ms and pdfmark, I employ a separate binding 
macro package, called spdf.tmac, which .mso's *both* s.tmac and pdfmark.tmac, 
and also performs any additional initialisation necessary to make the two 
co-operate effectively.  I then use `groff -mspdf ...' -- or rather, because 
of the multiple pass processing requirement, `pdfroff -mspdf ...' to perform 
the formatting.  From the outset, I have always foreseen that similar binding 
packages could be provided, e.g. mpdf.tmac, epdf.tmac and ompdf.tmac, to 
support PDF formatting with mm, me and mom respectively.

While the use of pdfmark.tmac/pdfroff as the referencing package is specific 
to the formatting of PDF output, I would suggest that a similar package 
architecture could be equally suited to other document types, and IMO, should 
be preferred to tight integration of any one set of referencing macros, which 
may not be universally suitable, directly into the main macro package.

pdfmark.tmac and pdfroff are already provided in the contrib/pdfmark 
directory of the groff CVS.  Documentation is still far from complete, but 
the macros themselves do seem to be quite usable.  If you were interested in 
working on an ompdf.tmac binding package to go with them, I would be willing 
to give you any assistance I could;  otherwise, I may get around to it 
myself, some day, but it could be a long time coming.

Best regards,
Keith.