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Date:         Mon, 16 Jul 90 14:29:00 PDT
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
From: Don Hosek <DHOSEK@HMCVAX.bitnet>
Subject:      Table of contents stuff
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
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X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 184

A few points regarding Nico's scheme for partial tables of
contents etc.

(1) He seems to be adding a lot of unnecessary commands. I think
something along the lines of

\contentsentry{NAME}{NUMBER}{ENTRY}{PAGE}

should be enough for most applications (in fact most document
styles come moderately close, doing instead,

\contentsline{NAME}{\numberline{NUMBER}ENTRY}{PAGE}

in most cases.

If we wanted to produce a table of contents entry for chapter six,
we would keep reading the TOC file until we found

\contentsentry{chapter}{6}{...}{...}

We would then interpret each \contentsentry command until we hit
the end of file or

\contentsentry{chapter}{...}{...}{...}

whichever comes first.

PROBLEMS

We would need to read in a lot of irrelevant information,
especially for, say, chapter 243 of Professor Prolix's magnum
opus.

What if a book has two chapter 2's?

ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS

It seems, looking over Nico's macros, that the LaTeX source needs
to be broken into files to correspond to the hierarchy of the
tables of contents. Bad plan. The more files one has for a
document, the more difficult it is to maintain; (I speak from
personal experience on this). Also, this can lead to people
mistakenly believing that the \include is what causes the chapter
tables of contents to be created. The above approach obviates that
need; a little work can also allow faster scanning of the toc
file(s) if we _do_ break them down into pieces with \include.
A similar approach in parsing the bib file might be useful for
BibTeX.

As for the two chapter 2 point, the only case where this sort of
thing could be a problem would be when we start from chapter 1 at
the beginning of each part; in that case, a slightly more
complicated algorithm would be needed to make sure that we have
passed the appropriate \contentsentry{part}&c command.

Comments?

-dh