kevin@ttidca.TTI.COM (Kevin Carothers) (08/29/89)
Hello
I apologize if this is a simple request, but all the nroff/troff
people I know don't seem to have any ideas either, so here goes.
I have a very large document, consisting of multiple chapters, and
I would like to pass the ending page from the previous chapter to
thefirst page of the next chapter (plus 1, of course).
Does anyone have any nifty algorithms for doing this? So far I haven't
been able to figure out a simple way of doing this.
The only thing that seems doable so far is to append a ".so" to the end
of each chapter, but this is rather unacceptable, as each chapter can
stand on its own, or in conjunction with all others.
The Nroff/Troff Users guide mentions that number registers (.nr %) can
be read or written, but I have seen no example. Ideally, I would like to
set an environment variable with the page #, so that from a makefile I can
do something like
"nroff -ms -n$page chapterx.ms"
Any help would be very welcome.
Thank you all
--
Kevin Carothers {philabs,csun,psivax}!ttidca!kevinpsfales@cbnewsc.ATT.COM (Peter Fales) (08/30/89)
In article <5689@ttidca.TTI.COM>, kevin@ttidca.TTI.COM (Kevin Carothers) writes: > people I know don't seem to have any ideas either, so here goes. > > I have a very large document, consisting of multiple chapters, and > I would like to pass the ending page from the previous chapter to > thefirst page of the next chapter (plus 1, of course). > > The Nroff/Troff Users guide mentions that number registers (.nr %) can > be read or written, but I have seen no example. Ideally, I would like to > set an environment variable with the page #, so that from a makefile I can > do something like > > "nroff -ms -n$page chapterx.ms" I don't have access to the ms macros, but if I understand what you are asking, I tried the following and it works. nroff -mm -rP5 filex This cause the first page to be printed with page number 5. By way of explanation, "P" is the name of the number register that holds the page number in the mm macros. It can be be set this way from the command line, or by putting a .nr P 5 in the document. Number registers can also be printed in a document using the \n construct. You could say somthing like: "the page number I am currently on is \nP." To print a two character number register like Fg, you would print \n(Fg. I hope this is what you are looking for. -- Peter Fales AT&T, Room 5B-420 2000 N. Naperville Rd. UUCP: ...att!peter.fales Naperville, IL 60566 Domain: peter.fales@att.com work: (312) 979-8031
henry%angel@Sun.COM (Henry McGilton -- Software Products) (08/31/89)
In article 5223, 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). * Does anyone have any nifty algorithms for doing this? * So far I haven't been able to figure out a simple way * of doing this. * The only thing that seems doable so far is to append a * ".so" to the end of each chapter, but this is rather * unacceptable, as each chapter can stand on its own, or * in conjunction with all others. What you want is doable without mucking around with .so lines and such. * The Nroff/Troff Users guide mentions that number * registers (.nr %) can be read or written, but I have * seen no example. Be aware that even if you set the % number register from the command line, you might not necessarily get the results you want, because the -ms macro package uses an internal number register called PN to record its notion of the current page. * Ideally, I would like to set an environment variable * with the page #, so that from a makefile I can do * something like * nroff -ms -n$page chapterx.ms By an `environment variable' I assume you mean a Shell environment variable? If so, be aware that it's only fairly recently that make took notice of Shell environment variables. Older versions of make couldn't do this, and if you're stuck with such a version, you'll have to modify the approach. I show how below. There are several approaches. First off, if you've already gone to the trouble of creating a Makefile, why format one chapter at a time? Just format the whole shebang every time. Create a Makefile that has approximately this form: CHAPTERS = c1.ms c2.ms c3.ms c4.ms . . . and so on . . . DEVICE = -Tlw MACROPACKAGE = -ms FORMATTER = /usr/bin/troff $(DEVICE) $(MACROPACKAGE) -t book.dit: $(FORMATTER) $(CHAPTERS) > book.dit This way, the document gets formatted every time, and the start page of one chapter is one more than the end page of the previous chapter. OK -- it's quite possible you're concerned about the amount of time taken to reformat the whole document every time a line gets changed. Especially if your document is large. But just for comparison, my 600 page UNIX System V book formats in under two hours on a Sun-2/120 (that includes cross references, pic, tbl, eqn, troff, tables of contents, and index). However, here's one way to do what you want. Create a Makefile that looks like this: 1 DEVICE = -Tlw 2 MACROPACKAGE = -ms 3 FORMATTER = /usr/bin/troff $(DEVICE) $(MACROPACKAGE) -t 5 .SUFFIXES: .ms .dit 6 .ms.dit: 7 $(FORMATTER) -rP$$page $< > $@ Let's pull this apart. Line 5 describes the suffixes you will be using. You will be transforming ms files into dit files. I am assuming you're using device independent troff here. The same process applies equally well to nroff or old four font C/A/T troff. Lines 6 and seven describe the actual rule. To get from a .ms file to a .dit file, you run the formatter, with the input file as the $< macro, and the output file as the $@ macro. Notice the -rP$$page portion of the rule. This is setting number register P to the contents of the page environment variable. This assumes you have a version of make that looks at environment variables. Why the double $ sign? make uses the $ sign to mark the onset of a macro reference. If you simply coded it as $page as in your query, make would expand this reference as whatever `p' is defined to be, followed by the letters `age'. Chances are, this would expand to troff -Tlw -ms -t age c1.ms > c1.dit and troff would then complain about not being able to open file `age'. The double $ sign expands to a single $ sign, and then the Shell fills in the result of $page when the Shell eventually gets to running the troff command. How would you use this? You would do something like: setenv page 5 (if you're using the C Shell) make chapter1.dit But, rather than messing with environment variables, you could simply pass the page number into the make process as a make macro. Modify the Makefile to read: 6 .ms.dit: 7 $(FORMATTER) -rP$(PAGE) $< > $@ and then you type make chapter1.dit PAGE=5 Now, so far, I haven't said how you get the starting page number into the actual troff process. At the start of each of your chapters, you could write something like this: 1 .LP 2 .rs 3 .if \nP 4 .bp \nP 5 .NH 1 6 Chapter One Heading 7 .LP 8 text Line 1 is the .LP (or .PP, .IP, .QP, or whatever) you need to get the -ms macro package initialised. Line 2 clears no space mode so the .bp will have effect. Line 3 asks if the P number register has been set to something other than zero from the troff command line. If it has, line 4 does a page eject withe that page number as the start page number. There are other approaches, but they involve making changes to the macro package. Here is another approach. This one assumes you're using device independent troff. Device independent troff places the page number at the start of each `page' in its output file. The page number just appears at the start of the line, like p123 for page 123. Note that the page number is the actual number printed at the bottom of the page, as a decimal number. This means that you can discover the number of the last printed page by simply doing grep ^p outputfile.dit The last page number printed will be the last line of output from grep. For example, I have this file called c1.dit and I can run grep to get the result like this: grep ^p c1.dit p1 p5 p6 Why is there a p1 in the file? That's because of the extra blank page generated by the .bp in the example earlier. The real start of the chapter is at page 5, and the chapter is two pages long. Now I can embellish this process a little by doing: grep ^p c1.dit | sed -n -e '$s/p//p' 6 The sed command goes to the last line of its input, subsitutes the letter `p' for nothing, and prints the result. So, now you get the number 6. How would you use this magic? Suppose you already had built chapter1.dit, and you now want to start on chapter2.dit. The starting page number for chapter2.dit can be obtained by: make chapter2.dit PAGE=`grep ^p chapter1.dit | sed -n -e '$s/p//p'` Finally, suppose all your chapter pages should start on odd numbered pages. Pipe the output of sed into this silly little awk program: awk '{ if ($0 % 2 == 0) print $0 + 1; else print $0 + 2 }' I package the grep, sed, and awk stuff into a little Shell script called getlast or something like that, and use it instead of the complex command line. +------------------+------------------------+---------------------------+ | Henry McGilton | I saw the future, | arpa: hmcgilton@sun.com | | Sun Microsystems | and it didn't work. | uucp: ...!sun!angel!henry | | Mt. View, CA | | | +------------------+------------------------+---------------------------+
yost@esquire.UUCP (David A. Yost) (08/31/89)
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