  Two candidates for "almost-invariant" toroidal surfaces passing through
magnetic islands, namely quadratic-flux-minimizing (QFMin) surfaces and ghost
surfaces, use families of periodic pseudo-orbits (i.e. paths for which the
action is not exactly extremal). QFMin pseudo-orbits, which are
coordinate-dependent, are field lines obtained from a modified magnetic field,
and ghost-surface pseudo-orbits are obtained by displacing closed field lines
in the direction of steepest descent of magnetic action, $\oint
\vec{A}\cdot\mathbf{dl}$. A generalized Hamiltonian definition of ghost
surfaces is given and specialized to the usual Lagrangian definition. A
modified Hamilton's Principle is introduced that allows the use of Lagrangian
integration for calculation of the QFMin pseudo-orbits. Numerical calculations
show QFMin and Lagrangian ghost surfaces give very similar results for a
chaotic magnetic field perturbed from an integrable case, and this is explained
using a perturbative construction of an auxiliary poloidal angle for which
QFMin and Lagrangian ghost surfaces are the same up to second order. While
presented in the context of 3-dimensional magnetic field line systems, the
concepts are applicable to defining almost-invariant tori in other $1{1/2}$
degree-of-freedom nonintegrable Lagrangian/Hamiltonian systems.
