Re: Learning troff - where to start?

[Johann Höchtl]

On 21.10.20 22:21, Wim Stockman wrote:
> maybe you can start by reading the book.
> it has new life on github.
> https://github.com/larrykollar/Unix-Text-Processing


Thank you for the link. However I am specifically asking the top-poster 
Pierre-Jean how he achieves the following in his utmac-macro:

https://pjfichet.github.io/utroff/pub/layout-uh.pdf

You see that section references are at the start of the document and I wonder 
how this can be done as, as far as I know, troff is single pass and therefore a 
TOC has to be at the end of a document. In the link I provided you see the TOC 
however at the start and I do not thing a postscript re-arrangement of pages is 
used.

> Op wo 21 okt. 2020 om 21:47 schreef Johann Höchtl <johann.hoechtl@gmail.com
> > :
> > On 19.10.20 14:14, Johann Höchtl wrote:
> > > On 15.10.20 16:37, Pierre-Jean Fichet wrote:
> > > > To fetch for ideas on how to do this or that, maybe can I also point
> > > > to my macros, as they'll work with neatroff too, and implement a lot
> > > > of things: https://github.com/pjfichet/utmac/
> > > I installed utmac by downloading it and copying all .tmac - files into
> > > netaroff's tmac directory.
> > >
> > > Then I copied para.tr and lorem.tr into the demo directory of neatroff
> > > and executed:
> > >
> > >
> > > ../neatroff/roff  -mu-fonts -mus para.tr | ../neatpost/pdf -pa4 >
> > out.pdf
> > > (also tried for curiosity with muh and mul)
> > >
> > >
> > > That creates a workable pdf but produces the following error:
> > >
> > >
> > > neatroff: failed to mount <f-001>
> > > neatroff: failed to mount <f-000>
> > > neatroff: failed to mount <f-001>
> > > neatroff: failed to mount <f-000>
> > > neatroff: failed to mount <f-001>
> > > neatroff: failed to mount <f-000>
> > > neatroff: failed to mount <f-001>
> > > neatroff: failed to mount <f-000>
> > >
> > >
> > > I suspect I have missing fonts or am I missing another utmac - macro
> > > inclusion?
> > Your help would be very appreciated. BTW How comes that section headings
> > work as a forward reference? Can I move with utmac the complete TOC to
> > the frontmatter without using psutils or the likes?
> >
> >
> > > Best, Johann
> > >
> > > > Hoping that helps!
> > > > Pierre-Jean.