Re: [Groff] Typesetting Software

[Larry Kollar]

Joerg van den Hoff wrote:

>>> groff is a single pass formatter, LaTeX is multi-pass.
>>
>> Not sure what you mean by this, but groff and TeX are
>> pretty much the same in this regard.  Both are single-pass
>> formatters... both require multiple
>> invocations to enable forward references at all.
>
> I meant: the functionality is in place. you call latex a few times
> on the same document and than you get the correctly formatted document.
> (the necessary information seemingly stored in aux files or whatever --
> I really don't know latex well). with groff this sure does not work this
> way. if there is a smart way I don't know it. I usually start to use
> several small shell scripts to get the job done. even a trivial thing
> seems not _that_ straightforward: getting the table of content to the
> front. I actually cut+paste the .dit file via a 'awk' script at the end
> of my processing pipeline. I don't feel that all this is as easy with
> groff as with latex.

I use a Makefile to do the driving. First pass (run with -z to suppress output) 
collects headings, cross-reference targets, index entries, and their page 
numbers into an auxfile. I then use scripts to generate markup for ToC, index 
(the Kernighan scripts), and cross-reference strings/page numbers. Second pass 
collects up these files and generates a PostScript file that is subsequently 
fed to ps2pdf. All by typing "make." I can also go back & tweak the ToC a bit, 
and the Makefile only runs the second pass.


>> LaTeX also uses multiple passes (you just call the program
>> twice;
>
> might well be. if so it would be _very_ nice to have the functionality
> integrated in the distribution. my point was: you can do all this in
> latex out of the box, while in groff you can't.

The groff -mm macros are already set up for this kind of treatment; "mmroff" is 
a script that does pretty much the same things as my Makefile.

-- Larry