Re: [Groff] pdfroff produces two copies

[Keith Marshall]

On Tuesday 04 August 2009 00:31:23 brian m. carlson wrote:
> > pdfroff test1.tr >test1.pdf
> > acroread test1.pdf
> >
> >
> > Two copies of the document are contained in test1.pdf
>
> Yes, I discovered this the other day.  It's Debian bug 538326:

It is not a bug; it is how pdfroff performs collation of TOC, as 
generated by, e.g., the ms macros' XA and TC features.

> I did
> some basic analysis of the problem, which seems to be that the PS
> output for the TOC formatting and the body formatting are
> identical.

This will be the case, if your input isn't properly set up to 
discriminate between them.

> Those two files are then concatenated before being 
> sent to ghostscript.

There is a filtering step in between, which requires proper setup; if 
it isn't set up properly, the filter does nothing, and you get two 
copies.

> Since I'm not sure how pdfroff is supposed to work, the best I can
> do is describe the problem.

It is working as intended.  It's a bit kludgy, I know, but for the 
time being, if you didn't set it up with a TOC section, *you* have 
to tell pdfroff that there is no such section to collate, by adding 
the --no-toc-relocation option to your command line:

  pdfroff --no-toc test1.tr > test1.pdf

Improving this is on my TODO list, but since it works perfectly well 
when used as I intended, this is not high on my priority list.

BTW, pdfroff is designed to work in conjunction with pdfmark.tmac; 
omitting that seems rather unusual.

-- 

Regards,
Keith.