kar@ritcv.UUCP (Kenneth A Reek) (11/11/83)
I have found a bug in the "me" macros that shows up in an unusual way. I am working on a rather complicated document that includes sections and floating figures. I defined a $0 macro to capture the section names and add them to an index. Every once in a while when the index was printed, a few section names had turned into a newline. I first thought that it was a problem in my input file, but the name printed fine in the section heading itself. After seeing this a few times, I finally saw the pattern. Whenever a section header printed out just after a float ".(z" had printed out, only then would the section name disappear from the index. I looked through the macros and found a string named "|x" used in the section header macros, the index macros, and the float macros, and nowhere else. In the section header stuff it appeared to be a temporary that held the section name. I guessed that its use in the float was destroying the section name. To test the theory I changed the all of the |x to |y in sh.me and all of the |x to |w in float.me, as neither |w nor |y were used anywhere else. Sure enough, this made the problem go away. Perhaps a smaller change would have worked, but I prefer to experiment with nroff macros as little as possible. Ken Reek, Rochester Institute of Technology seismo!rochester!ritcv!kar