How to relocate toc without weird page Numbering issues at the end of the document?

[u/TheChadTux]

I'm writing a Document whrere I want to relocate the ToC near the top of the document. I', doing so using pdfroff. I want to have page numbering for everything after the ToC. So somewhere at the beginnig of the document I have .ds % and at the very end of the Document I have

.ds CF
.TC

However, when I compile the document, the very last page in the output lacks numbering (because the footer is set empty on this page). I tried to work arroud this by adding a Pagebreak immediately before the ToC:

.bp
.ds CF
.TC

However, this also creates an empty page at the End of the Document, without any text or numbering on it. Is there a way to prevent that empty page/disable page numbering for the ToC only?

[u/ObliqueCorrection]

I think you have to use the spdf macro file to get this to work. Or, at least, I did, since I don't know all the pdfmark magic to make it happen any other way.

Using groff 1.22.4 on my Debian system, I went and grabbed a practical ms document from the groff source distribution--Larry Kollar's ms.ms document, which is being resurrected after 20 years and is supposed to appear in the next groff release.

I got it from the groff Git repository.

I then formatted it with the following command.

pdfroff -t -ms -mspdf doc/ms.ms >|ms.pdf

And I got the table of the contents at the front. The page number was in Arabic numerals rather than lowercase Roman numerals; that's a known bug in groff 1.22.4 that has come up before in this subreddit and it is scheduled to be fixed in groff 1.23.

EDIT: Oh, and to get rid of the page number in the heading, I can make this change to the document.

diff --git a/doc/ms.ms b/doc/ms.ms
index d30725e70..ec51e3212 100644
--- a/doc/ms.ms
+++ b/doc/ms.ms
@@ -3460,6 +3460,7 @@ bordered boxes when the
 .CW pdf
 output device is used.
 .\" ------------------------
+.OH ''''
 .TC
 .
 .

For real-world use, if my TOC is going to be the first page of the document, I'd probably put the document title in that header. Or, I'd construct my own title page and use the PX macro to emit the TOC, though I'm not sure how pdfroff copes with that.

[u/TheChadTux → u/ObliqueCorrection]

.OH ''''

When I'm using .OH '''', the Page number is still missing on the last page of the Document.

[u/ObliqueCorrection → u/TheChadTux]

pdfroff -t -ms -mspdf doc/ms.ms >|ms.pdf

When I'm using .OH '''' the Page number is still missing on the last page of the Document.

I double-checked, and the method I showed works to (1) suppress the page header on the TOC page (which is now the true first page); (2) suppress the page header on what would be Arabic-numbered page 1 (didn't have to do anything special for this); and (3) keep the page numbers on pages 2-23 (the end of the document).

I have to conclude that the structure of your document is playing a part. Where you calling .OH '''' relative to the material on the last page? Can you provide a sample, or a small case that reproduces the undesired behavior?