(21-11-2021, 02:40 PM)movq Wrote: I really want to dig through all that. I want to use troff more often. I have some super large documents (thousands of pages) that are currently turned into PDFs using LaTeX, which is just insanely slow for documents of that size. troff should do the job just as fine and I hope that it’ll be quite a bit faster.

You asked me about how I do TOC on the document; here I explain how I do that.
You can check my Makefile. It runs troff twice: It first parses some of the source files to generate a index.roff from the stderr of the troff command. The index.roff file describes the contents of the TOC. In a second pass, it processes the title.roff (the pages before the toc), index.roff (the TOC itself) and the other files, and outputs to the post processor (dpost), that will generate the document.

So, I have the following .roff files:

• mb.tmac: The first argument on both passes. It contain the macro definitions.
  
• fonts.roff: The second argument on both passes. It sets the fonts (in heirloom troff style, groff handles fonts differently).
  
• title.roff: Only given as argument in the second pass, it describes the pages before the TOC.
  
• index.roff: Only given as argument in the second pass, this file is generated by the first pass.
  
• ${SRC}: The body of the book (chapters and appendix).
  

I'm writing a manual for the -mb macro package.
(Yes, I make it work first then write the documentation later...)