I think you would have to use two passes of troff. The first pass would generate the info you needed to define the crossref macro.
For example: .NH 2 Middle of Paper .LP .tm crossref: .if "\\\\$1"middle" see sec. \*(SN I have the label 'crossref:' in case you are generating definitions for several macros, and you want to grep the standard error to treat different lines in different ways. If you're using -mpm, for example, and you like running heads that change with section number changes, you need to use a method like this to define a running-head macro. If crossrefs turn out to be the only things that need this treatment, you can obviously leave the label out. Do a pass with troff -ms mypaper >[2]crossrefs. So crossrefs will look like .de CR .if "\\$1"middle" see sec. 3.7 .if "\\$1"differentsection" see sec. 7.2.6 . . .. Then read in crossrefs on the next pass, and all of your refs in the doc like .CR middle .CR differentsection should work. Putting thought into a text processing mkfile is probably worthwhile here. Although it's another example of bibliographic references, Russ Cox once posted some scripts using rc, awk and a mkfile that used this two pass idea. It would probably be worth looking at his example too. It's quite brief. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.plan9/browse_thread/thread/76ff0d3dc3c49e59/03bfa13f60f56900?lnk=gst&q=rsc+refs#03bfa13f60f56900 I think this is roughly right; I haven't used troff in a while. I'm sure someone else will chime in if there's an easier approach. HTH Greg On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Rudolf Sykora <rudolf.syk...@gmail.com>wrote: > > There's two versions of refer in contrib. One version is > forsyth/refer.tgz, > > which is just refer, 'slightly improved,' and the other version is > > steve/refer, which is refer from forsyth with bin2ref and the plan 9 > > bibliography from the University of Utah. They can be installed with > contrib. > > Hope that's what you need. > > If I understand, refer is primarily meant to manage bibliographical > references. > I need cross-references within a document, like to pictures, pages, > figures, equations, ... --- that's why I mentioned 'lbl' and asked > whether there is a native port. Or more generally, what others use. I > can't believe it'd be possible to write a longer document without > automatically managing such things. > Ruda > >
