Re: Groff's -mm Indexing

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Damian,

Okay.  Here is the example I used to figure out the feature and update
the documentation.  This is using groff 1.22.4.  You will notice page
breaks in annoying places (this is a bug fix I have queued for
post-1.23.0), but the index _is_ present.

Procedure:

$ mkdir /tmp/branden/damian
$ cp EXPERIMENTS/use-index.mm /tmp/branden/damian
$ cd /tmp/branden/damian
$ mmroff use-index.mm > use-index.ps
$ evince use-index.ps

At 2023-07-01T01:20:44+1000, Damian McGuckin wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jun 2023, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> 
> > Does this help?
> 
> No. But maybe it is me.
> 
>       .INITI P "damian" \" I must create "damian.ind" beforehand
> 
>       .IND item0
> 
>       .IND item1
> 
>       .IND item2
> 
>       .INDO \" at the point where I want the Index
> 
> I see a new page, and two empty pages.

Oh!  You created index entries before you had any text.  Even the first
page hadn't started yet.

I reckon I could add a test to `IND` to make it howl if the vertical
drawing position is negative at the time it is called.

Also you do _not_ need to create the index file beforehand.

> That's all. No errors.

Right.  Your minimalism was too minimal.  In practice, index entries
correspond to some item of text or at least a location in the document.
Your document never even started the first page (in the initial run).

> Off to sleep now.

I hope you wake up to a happier result.

Regards,
Branden

use-index.mm
Description: application/freemind

use-index.ps
Description: PostScript document

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature