Re: [Groff] Proposed revised START macro for mom

[James J. Ramsey]

I just realized a couple extra complications:

The easy one first:

 Hence,
> it's a good idea to leave mom's internal strings in
> your macros; anyone
> with the urge and the knowledge to modify om.tmac
> shouldn't have too
> much difficulty changing them to absolute values or
> strings of their own
> definition.

Internal strings like $TITLE_FAM and $TITLE_FT size
are easy for the user to replace with absolute values.
However, it is not sensible to replace defined strings
like $CHAPTER, $CHAPTER_STRING and $CHAPTER_TITLE with
absolute string values, since the values of those
strings should change with every invocation of the
.START macro. Therefore, defined strings like
$CHAPTER, $CHAPTER_STRING and $CHAPTER_TITLE, or
equivalents/aliases of them, should be earmarked for
external use.

Now for the hard one:

> The repeated (and therefore incrementing)
> #DOCHEADER_LINES register
> keeps track of the number of lines in a docheader. 
> At the end of the
> docheader, mom multiplies the number of docheader
> lines by the docheader
> leading to establish the depth of the docheader. 

If the macros are user-redefinable, that may not be a
good way to determine docheader depth. Changes in line
spacing and spacing commands within the docheader
would make the product
\\n[#DOCHEADER_LINES]*\\n[#DOCHEADER_LEAD]
non-representative of the docheader's depth. If there
were a nice and robust way of calculating the depth of
the docheader, regardless of its contents, that would
be helpful. About the only way I can think of would be
to divert the contents of the docheader into a macro
and store the height of that diversion into some
register called #DOCHEADER_DEPTH. I'm not sure if that
will work, help, or make things worse.

Any ideas?


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