Re: TeX beginner, Macro List?

Andrew Tomazos <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On Jun 3, 11:16=A0pm, Peter Flynn <peter.n...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When I try the above the table of contents produces just the word
"Contents" and no list undernearth it (even though I have sections an=
d
subsections in my article). =A0Immediately below the word "Contents" =
is
the word "Abstract".

Re-run LaTeX.

Yep. it works now. =A0What exactly happened or don't I want to know?

LaTeX processes your document sequentially, starting at the first ine
and ending at the last line: it doesn't read it all into memory at once
like a wordprocessor, [snip]

Sure, as a programmer I understand the space implications of
processing a stream rather than building a complete object model in
memory - but consider the following algorithm:

1. Process document, and if "/tableofcontents" used
than set variable UsesTOC = true

3. Generate .toc file

4. If (new .toc file != old .toc file) and UsesTOC
than process document again

This doesn't use any extra memory, and is essentially what you have to
do manually anyway right?

This kind of reasoning and dependency analysis is standard practice in
most build systems, and I would have thought would be fairly trivial
to implement.

tex isn't, unfortunately, a "build system"; as herbert pointed out,
there are systems that are "tex build systems" such as latexmk, and
even stick-in-the-muds like me tend to use a make system of some sort
for building anything significant.

the further complication is the restrictions put on tex
functionality. those are (finally) in the firing line: one could
imagine a luatex arrangement that does exactly as you suggest, though
i'm not sure luatex is up to the mark for typesetting even my
relatively simple documents, yet. (when my current version of the faq
ships, i intend to give luatex a try with it, but first things first...)
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge
.

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