> I see now, that for most purposes, macros involving > preprocessors should be avoided.
For the most part, yes. There probably *are* some cool tricks you can do, but they would require a good idea of what happens internally. > I suppose one alternative would be to use special tags > within comments to be targeted with sed/perl/tt/m4 later. With regard to tables, you might also try the HDtbl package, a set of macros for typesetting tables which runs completely within groff, without using a preprocessor. Another idea you might pursue is to extend Ted's suggestion to a two-pass scheme (if you have forward cross-references in your text, you'll usually have a multi-pass scheme already): in the first pass, your table macros write out files, which are sourced in the second pass (but the source request should not be inside a macro, so soelim can pick it up, otherwise tbl won't see the table either), maybe like so: .so mytable1.tbl .mytable mytable1.tbl data data data ... .endmytable where "mytable" is a macro which writes a file which can be parsed by tbl (i.e., everything from .TS to .TE), and whose name is specified as an argument (in this example "mytable1.tbl"). As an exercise for the experts, it might even be possible to (ugh!) redefine ".so" as the mytable macro, so you wouldn't have to give the filename twice...
