Re: Pushing a mom test fix

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi, Peter!

At 2021-10-05T15:37:09-0400, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> >> Something in the pipeline is tagging material after a PAUSE
> >> ('.pdfpause' from pdf.tmac) as a new page.
> > 
> > Each separate transition is in fact a "page"
> 
> That's what I figured when I saw Branden's commit.  Is this
> something that should be documented?

It's a measurement that is internal to the test script.  This is one of
the ones I _didn't_ write; Bertrand did.  As far as the question of
documentation goes, the measurement is coming from the pdfinfo(1) tool,
and a quick look at its man page suggests that it's not mentioned there.
On my Debian system, this comes from "poppler-utils", which doesn't ship
any other documentation, and doesn't offer a "poppler-doc" package
either.  So maybe the man pages are all we get.

We could add a notice in gropdf(1) about this.  Checking the ditroff
form of slide_demo.mom[1], I get a page count of 8.  More ambitiously,
maybe we could put something in the generated ditroff output to mark
page/slide transition boundaries more clearly (maybe it's already there
and I don't understand the format well enough).

$ grep 'pdf: transition' contrib/mom/examples/slide-demo.ditroff | wc -l
30

That isn't 8 _or_ 33, so am I little mystified.

> I don't imagine many users need to know the number of virtual pages in
> a slide presentation.  On the other hand, maintainers might, as
> Branden discovered.

I think the measurement is being used to detect whether something went
so drastically wrong with formatting that the page count got thrown off.
The semantics of transitions in slide decks being counted as pages, to
me, don't seem really important one way or the other, for the test.

Remember to "make check" before a "git push" and everything will be
fine, I think. :D

Regards,
Branden

[1] by using "make V=1" to see what command was being run, and then copy
    and pasting it to the shell prompt with a `-Z` option added to the
    large pdfmom command

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