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Re: Automatically updated Table of Contents with Nroff

2011-03-17 10:54:24
Julian,

I'm not sure what you have in mind that would change the page breaks.

NroffEdit accomplish this by iterating the task a number of times.

The following steps are executed:

1) Analyzing the Nroff document to determine which headings are present
and their data.
2) Compiles the text document.
3) Analyzing the text document to figure out on which pages the headings
appeared
4) Pasting the preliminary ToC in the Nroff document
5) compiling the text to allow pages breaks to adjust due to the added ToC
6) Analyzing the text to figure out where the headings finally ended up
7) Updating the ToC with final data.


These steps happens each time you press update <F3> or when you save the
document. The ToC is always correct in the compiled txt document.

/Stefan





On 11-03-17 3:12 PM, "Julian Reschke" <julian(_dot_)reschke(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de> 
wrote:

On 17.03.2011 14:59, Martin Rex wrote:
Julian Reschke wrote:

On 17.03.2011 01:07, Stefan Santesson wrote:
...
This is not correct.

The automatic ToC function (and now since version 1.40 also the
automated
reference function) operates using commands hidden behind Nroff
comments.
A standard NROFF compiler will ignore the comments and process the
ToC as
if it was manually entered. The ToC will match the document even if
compiled by a standard NROFF compiler.
...

Yes, but only as long page breaks aren't changed, right? That is, the
ToC contains fixed page numbers, no?

That is a non-issue.  NRoffEdit produces the same output as the
nroff used by the RFC-Editor.

If you want to change the text, you would use NRroffEdit to do it
and update the TOC accordingly by a simple keypress or menu selection.

Martin,

the context of this was a discussion how to generate a ToC using NROFF.

My comment was regarding the claim that NRoffEdit somehow achieves this;
it does not. It just does exactly what xml2rfc does: it paginates itself
and adjusts the ToC accordingly. Once you feed the nroff output, be it
from NRoffEdit or xml2rfc, into a standard nroff process, it'll get
incorrect as soon as page breaks change.

This is relevant as changing vertical whitespace is one of the remaining
reasons why the RFC Production Center uses nroff today (besides archival).

Best regards, Julian
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