[Groff] gropdf and pdfroff

[Deri James]

pdfroff is a very clever and useful utility in groff and I'd appreciate advice 
on how best to integrate it into gropdf. Currently gropdf includes its own 
pdfmark macros which are intended as a drop in replacement for pdfmark.tmac, 
in fact most of the macros are based on Keith Marshall's work.

Pdroff does the following:-

A) Resolves all forward references by having multiple groff runs.
B) Allows an optional cover sheet to be included as a frontispiece (--
stylesheet).
C) Relocates the TOC to the 2nd page.

The first two functions are already implemented by doing:-

groff -M. -mspdf2 -ms -T pdf -dPDF.EXPORT=1 -z cover.ms pdfmark.ms 2>&1 | groff 
-M. -mspdf2 -ms -Tpdf - cover.ms pdfmark.ms | okular - 

Where spdf2 is a slightly tweaked version of Keith's spdf.tmac (which works 
with both the grops and gropdf back ends).

The main difference is that the Table of Contents is not automatically 
relocated, and it is on this I would like advice.

In a pdf every page is an object and the page order is given in an array 
called "kids" which is an attribute of the "pages" object. So to reorder the 
pages in a pdf is simply a case of reordering this array before it is written 
to the file. Currently I just push each new page onto the end of the kids 
array, but it might be better to introduce a pair of "\X pdf:" commands which 
alter the insertion point for all following pages. Something along the lines 
of:-

\X pdf: pagename <name> \" name a location in the file
\X pdf: switchtopage (before|after) <name> \" start inserting pages 
before/after the named page.

If this was implemented any macros which include a TOC generator could be 
amended to position the TOC anywhere in the document, and if not using gropdf 
it would appear as now.

Does this sound like a reasonable facility?

Cheers 

Deri