Re: Groff macro to make .UR and .UE links clickable in PDF?

[Deri]

On Tuesday, 16 June 2020 02:52:17 BST Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> One person already recommended a way to make normal .Lk in mdoc(7)
> and normal .UR in man(7) produce PDF links with groff, but i suggest
> a different perspective.  Decide what it is that you really want:
> if you want excellent typography from an mdoc(7) document, use
> groff(1) PDF output.  If you want perfect linking on the web, PDF
> is not the ideal format.  In that case, use mandoc(1) HTML output,
> which is much better for the web.  You can see that output on
> man.bsd.lv, produced with the program from mandoc.bsd.lv.  It gives
> you much more linking and better linking than PDF ever could.
> 
> Yours,
>   Ingo

Hi Ingo,

I'm not sure I entirely agree about "more linking", you have probably seen this 
before:-

http://chuzzlewit.co.uk/

My HTML is awful but the underlying pdfs are fully linked with each other. 
Using okular in KDE 
desktop as the pdf viewer the http://links in the pdf are opened as another 
okular window. 
Other viewers/desktops will be different.

The program which creates these pdf man pages is a groff pre-processor, so you 
pass it a man 
or mandoc file and it outputs a file which can be passed to groff -T pdf 
-mandoc. The program 
is attached. As with most of my programs, I move onto something else once it is 
working 
sufficiently for my purposes. I attach the latest version, since it may be 
sufficient for "b9" to run 
against his lengthy man page when he wants to produce a pdf version.

Cheers 

Deri

pdfman
Description: Perl program