HELP SOUGHT WITH DIVERSIONS IN TROFF/-MS

[Bertrand Meyer]

Could someone help me with the following troff (under -ms) problem,
whose solution I have been unable to find in the manuals?

I want a macro which will accumulate some text from the input,
so that I can later use this text twice,
with different attributes each time
(in particular with different fonts: once in roman, once in boldface).
I have tried a solution along the lines of the following:

.de aS \"macro to start accumulating
.di xX \"start diversion
..

.de aE \"macro to end accumulating
.di \"end diversion
..

The idea is to use the macro in the following way:

.aS \"start accumulating
Here comes the text
.aE \"end accumulating

Then when I need the accumulated text for the first time, say in roman
and centered, I would write:

.R
.ce 100
.xX
.ce 0

The second time around, I want it, say, in boldface, indented:

.B
.in +5n
.xX
.in -5n
.R

However, this does not work; there is no way I can get different attributes
each time. I have tried different tricks (using environments, etc.), but to
no avail.

Let me mention why I tried this: I wanted a macro which would combine the
effects of .NH and .XS-.XE by collecting the title automatically for the
table of contents. I have a temporary solution (it uses a macro instead of
a diversion, where one of the macro arguments is the section title to be
collected). This works more or less but:
- it restricts titles to be at most one line long (is there any way
to have longer macro arguments?)
- I still have a problem in that .ce will center the macro argument
differently from anything else, which is rather ugly for a
chapter heading where the the chapter title is not well centered
below the word "CHAPTER" ! (I am writing books and want to submit
camera-ready manuscripts)
- It is intellectually irritating not to be able to use diversions
properly.

Thus I would greatly appreciate it if some troff wizard could help me.
Please send me mail. Unless the solution is trivial and I have overlooked
some elementary feature of troff, I will make it public as well as any
useful macro I devise.
Please no flame, I am still a fairly novice user of troff
(although I feel I am becoming an expert rapidly, which seems to be the
only way one can use this system at all).

--
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Bertrand Meyer UUCP: ...!ucbvax!ucsbcsl!bpm
Visiting Professor CSNET: b...@ucsb.CSnet-relay
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Telephone (805) 961-4385 or 961-4321
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