[bug #61836] want a page resequencer for intermediate output

[G. Branden Robinson]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61836>

                 Summary: want a page resequencer for intermediate output
                 Project: GNU troff
            Submitted by: gbranden
            Submitted on: Mon 17 Jan 2022 05:33:28 AM UTC
                Category: Utilities
                Severity: 1 - Wish
              Item Group: Feature change
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

Resequencing pages of an output document is necessary with
single-pass formatting.

Unfortunately, resequencing them while still in the digital
domain can be challenging.

[https://superuser.com/questions/366327/how-can-i-determine-the-page-count-from-a-postscript-file-generated-by-opera
"Unfortunately, there is no simple way of finding pages in a raw
Postscript file."]

Finding page boundaries is really easy in device-independent
_troff_ output, though!

It would be nice if someone wrote a tool to do this.  I imagine
it would need some kind of simple domain-specific language (DSL)
to be truly useful.  Perhaps as an adjunct we could have a small
auxiliary macro package that puts markers into output pages to
enable locating a table of contents or index.  Perhaps the most
flexible approach would be to enable the user to embed a simple
keyword of their choice which the grout-shuffler could then use
as page labels for the DSL.  Our ms and me macro packages could
of course do this behind the scenes since they have dedicated
macros for this sort of thing.

(I haven't given much thought to the problem of sorting an index
before _producing_ device-independent output, though.)

Volunteers welcome!





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