🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5689@ttidca.TTI.COM>, kevin@ttidca.TTI.COM (Kevin Carothers) writes:
>
> I have a very large document, consisting of multiple
> chapters, and I would like to pass the ending page from
> the previous chapter to the first page of the next
> chapter (plus 1, of course).

I don't have my solution online, but it's one
of the few things I ever did with troff that
was easier than I thought it would be, in
fact much easier.

* Make a directory called pn for page number files
* Make a file called pn/ch1.end.
* Link it to pn/ch2.begin.
* At the end of chapter one,
  .tm or .sy out the chapter number into pn/ch1.end.
* At the beginning of chapter 2, .so pn/ch2.begin.

Why the tricky linking, you ask.  For full
automation.  You want to simply call
.BEGIN_FILE at the beginning of the file, and
.END_FILE at the end, without hard coding
the file's name in itself (why worry about
editing the file just because you've changed
its name.)  When your makefile runs troff, it
sets a string variable to the filename, so
those macros can do their work with the
appropriate external files.

Now make a master file containing the names
of the source files in the order they appear
in the book, then write a shell script that
ensures that the right pn files exist and
that they are properly linked.

.PUTREF refs
In a similar vein, it is amazingly easy to do
page-numbered cross references in troff (see
p. \
.GETREF refs
).  You pick a name for each reference
target, and you have at least two macros, one
that outputs the current page number to a
file of that name and another that reads the
page number in.

Now the trick is to take the time to learn
TeX and apply all this technology to that
environment so I never have to touch troff
again.

 --dave yost