Re: man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Jeff Conrad wrote in
<address@hidden\
ook.com>:
 |A major drawback to manual pages formatted using the man macros is the
 |lack of bookmarks in a PDF file.  A quick and dirty way to get bookmarks
 |appears to be adding
 |
 |.am SH
 |.pdfbookmark 1 "\&\\$*"
 |..
 |.am SS
 |.pdfbookmark 2 "\&\\$*"
 |..

Why quick and dirty?  I am using this regulary for my mdocmx(7)
macros on top of normal mdoc(7) with groff 1.22.3 (since i have
not ported the enhance request to 1.22.4):

  .de mx:dump-anchor-pdf
  . \" Outline support
  . ie '\$1'Sh'     .pdfbookmark 1 "\$3"
  . el .if '\$1'Ss' .pdfbookmark 2 "\$3"
  .
  . ie d mx-debug \
  .   pdfhref M -N "\$2" -E "#\$2#"
  . el \
  .   pdfhref M -N "\$2"
  ..

 |to the beginning of the man page source (the PDFHREF.VIEW.LEADING
 |register needs a slight increase to make the heading texts visible when
 |clicking a bookmark).
 |
 |But this results in the message
 |
 |    "... can't transparently output node at top level";
 |
 |if there are many sections and subsections, there are a lot of messages.

I see exactly five such messages with a huge manual page with 666
anchors and thousands (!) of links.

 |It doesn't seem to cause much harm--the PDF bookmarks are duly created--
 |but the messages are distracting, and may make it easier to miss a real
 |error.  I don't get the messages if I call pdfbookmark directly from the
 |man page source rather than adding them to the macros; this certainly is
 |a solution, but it does require a fair bit of extra coding that adds
 |clutter to the document source.

For mdoc macros there are a lot of other messages which are
distracting, however.

 |I've looked at pdfmark.tmac and a couple of the groff source files, but
 |haven't been able to figure out what's happening.
 |
 |I get the same message using spdf (e.g., formatting the pdfmark
 |reference manual); is this just something one does not worry about?

That is an interesting question.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)