> G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I'd like to avoid doing what TeX does (or what its usual front-end
> does), and do what appears to be multi-pass formatting even when it's
> not necessary. Or maybe it _doesn't_ apply multiple passes
> unnecessarily, but its ordinary operation is so garrulous that I
> struggle to tell the difference.
In the years around 2004-2010, I maintained a pretty large[1] firmware guide
in Groff. Standard procedure was a two-pass format: build the table of contents
during the first pass, along with all forward references, then the second pass
resolved all the page numbers. Rarely, maybe once or twice a year, I needed a
third pass when pagination interfered with cross-references. But even on a
blue Mac G3 (1999 model), typing “make” and walking to the bathroom gave me
a clean PDF before I returned.
I’m not saying there are no use cases where 2026-vintage hardware needs help
building groff, but I believe it’s true that (besides Deri’s eye-popping use
case)
the vast majority of groff users aren’t going to notice an extra pass when it
comes
to processor usage.
— Larry
[1] “Pretty large” = around 1000 pages across four docs. Later on, I
consolidated
it into a single manual that ran 700-900 pages depending on build-time options.
