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PDFROFF(1) General Commands Manual PDFROFF(1)
NAME
pdfroff - create PDF documents using groff
SYNOPSIS
pdfroff [-abcegilpstzCEGNRSUVXZ] [-d cs] [-f fam] [-F dir] [-I dir] [-L arg] [-m name]
[-M dir] [-n num] [-o list] [-P arg] [-r cn] [-T dev] [-w name] [-W name]
[--emit-ps] [--no-toc-relocation] [--no-kill-null-pages] [--stylesheet=name]
[--no-pdf-output] [--pdf-output=name] [--no-reference-dictionary]
[--reference-dictionary=name] [--report-progress] [--keep-temporary-files] [file
...]
pdfroff -h
pdfroff --help
pdfroff -v [groff-option ...]
pdfroff --version [groff-option ...]
DESCRIPTION
pdfroff is a wrapper program for the GNU text processing system, groff. It transparently
handles the mechanics of multiple pass groff processing, when applied to suitably marked
up groff source files, such that tables of contents and body text are formatted sepa-
rately, and are subsequently combined in the correct order, for final publication as a
single PDF document. A further optional "style sheet" capability is provided; this allows
for the definition of content which is required to precede the table of contents, in the
published document.
For each invocation of pdfroff, the ultimate groff output stream is post-processed by the
GhostScript interpreter, to produce a finished PDF document.
pdfroff makes no assumptions about, and imposes no restrictions on, the use of any groff
macro packages which the user may choose to employ, in order to achieve a desired document
format; however, it does include specific built in support for the pdfmark macro package,
should the user choose to employ it. Specifically, if the pdfhref macro, defined in the
pdfmark.tmac package, is used to define public reference marks, or dynamic links to such
reference marks, then pdfroff performs as many preformatting groff passes as required, up
to a maximum limit of four, in order to compile a document reference dictionary, to re-
solve references, and to expand the dynamically defined content of links.
USAGE
The command line is parsed in accordance with normal GNU conventions, but with one excep-
tion -- when specifying any short form option (i.e., a single character option introduced
by a single hyphen), and if that option expects an argument, then it must be specified in-
dependently (i.e., it may not be appended to any group of other single character short
form options).
Long form option names (i.e., those introduced by a double hyphen) may be abbreviated to
their minimum length unambiguous initial substring.
Otherwise, pdfroff usage closely mirrors that of groff itself. Indeed, with the exception
of the -h, -v, and -T dev short form options, and all long form options, which are parsed
internally by pdfroff, all options and file name arguments specified on the command line
are passed on to groff, to control the formatting of the PDF document. Consequently,
pdfroff accepts all options and arguments, as specified in groff(1), which may also be
considered as the definitive reference for all standard pdfroff options and argument us-
age.
OPTIONS
pdfroff accepts all of the short form options (i.e., those introduced by a single hyphen),
which are available with groff itself. In most cases, these are simply passed transpar-
ently to groff; the following, however, are handled specially by pdfroff.
-h Same as --help; see below.
-i Process standard input, after all other specified input files. This is passed
transparently to groff, but, if grouped with other options, it must be the first in
the group. Hiding it within a group breaks standard input processing, in the mul-
tiple pass groff processing context of pdfroff.
-T dev Only -T ps is supported by pdfroff. Attempting to specify any other device causes
pdfroff to abort.
-v Same as --version; see below.
See groff(1) for a description of all other short form options, which are transparently
passed through pdfroff to groff.
All long form options (i.e., those introduced by a double hyphen) are interpreted locally
by pdfroff; they are not passed on to groff, unless otherwise stated below.
--help Causes pdfroff to display a summary of the its usage syntax, and supported options,
and then exit.
--emit-ps
Suppresses the final output conversion step, causing pdfroff to emit PostScript
output instead of PDF. This may be useful, to capture intermediate PostScript out-
put, when using a specialised postprocessor, such as gpresent for example, in place
of the default GhostScript PDF writer.
--keep-temporary-files
Suppresses the deletion of temporary files, which normally occurs after pdfroff has
completed PDF document formatting; this may be useful, when debugging formatting
problems.
See section "Files" below for a description of the temporary files used by pdfroff.
--no-pdf-output
May be used with the --reference-dictionary=name option (described below) to elimi-
nate the overhead of PDF formatting, when running pdfroff to create a reference
dictionary, for use in a different document.
--no-reference-dictionary
May be used to eliminate the overhead of creating a reference dictionary, when it
is known that the target PDF document contains no public references, created by the
pdfhref macro.
--no-toc-relocation
May be used to eliminate the extra groff processing pass, which is required to gen-
erate a table of contents, and relocate it to the start of the PDF document, when
processing any document which lacks an automatically generated table of contents.
--no-kill-null-pages
While preparing for simulation of the manual collation step, which is traditionally
required to relocate a table of contents to the start of a document, pdfroff accu-
mulates a number of empty page descriptions into the intermediate PostScript output
stream. During the final collation step, these empty pages are normally discarded
from the finished document; this option forces pdfroff to leave them in place.
--pdf-output=name
Specifies the name to be used for the resultant PDF document; if unspecified, the
PDF output is written to standard output. A future version of pdfroff may use this
option, to encode the document name in a generated reference dictionary.
--reference-dictionary=name
Specifies the name to be used for the generated reference dictionary file; if un-
specified, the reference dictionary is created in a temporary file, which is
deleted when pdfroff completes processing of the current document. This option
must be specified, if it is desired to save the reference dictionary, for use in
references placed in other PDF documents.
--report-progress
Causes pdfroff to display an informational message on standard error, at the start
of each groff processing pass.
--stylesheet=name
Specifies the name of an input file, to be used as a style sheet for formatting of
content, which is to be placed before the table of contents, in the formatted PDF
document.
--version
Causes pdfroff to display a version identification message. The entire command
line is then passed transparently to groff, in a one pass operation only, in order
to display the associated groff version information, before exiting.
ENVIRONMENT
The following environment variables may be set, and exported, to modify the behaviour of
pdfroff.
PDFROFF_COLLATE
Specifies the program to be used for collation of the finished PDF document.
This collation step may be required to move tables of contents to the start of the
finished PDF document, when formatting with traditional macro packages, which print
them at the end. However, users should not normally need to specify
PDFROFF_COLLATE, (and indeed, are not encouraged to do so). If unspecified,
pdfroff uses sed(1) by default, which normally suffices.
If PDFROFF_COLLATE is specified, then it must act as a filter, accepting a list of
file name arguments, and write its output to the stdout stream, whence it is piped
to the PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND, to produce the finished PDF output.
When specifying PDFROFF_COLLATE, it is normally necessary to also specify
PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES.
PDFROFF_COLLATE is ignored, if pdfroff is invoked with the --no-kill-null-pages op-
tion.
PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES
Specifies options to be passed to the PDFROFF_COLLATE program.
It should not normally be necessary to specify PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES. The inter-
nal default is a sed(1) script, which is intended to remove completely blank pages
from the collated output stream, and which should be appropriate in most applica-
tions of pdfroff. However, if any alternative to sed(1) is specified for
PDFROFF_COLLATE, then it is likely that a corresponding alternative specification
for PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES is required.
As in the case of PDFROFF_COLLATE, PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES is ignored, if pdfroff
is invoked with the --no-kill-null-pages option.
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND
Specifies the command to be used for the final document conversion from PostScript
intermediate output to PDF. It must behave as a filter, writing its output to the
stdout stream, and must accept an arbitrary number of files ... arguments, with the
special case of - representing the stdin stream.
If unspecified, PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND defaults to
gs -dBATCH -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sOutputFile=-
GROFF_TMPDIR
Identifies the directory in which pdfroff should create temporary files. If
GROFF_TMPDIR is not specified, then the variables TMPDIR, TMP and TEMP are consid-
ered in turn, as possible temporary file repositories. If none of these are set,
then temporary files are created in the current directory.
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER
Specifies the program to be invoked, when pdfroff converts groff PostScript output
to PDF. If PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND is specified, then the command name it
specifies is implicitly assigned to GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER, overriding any
explicit setting specified in the environment. If GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER is
not specified, then pdfroff searches the process PATH, looking for a program with
any of the well known names for the GhostScript interpreter; if no GhostScript in-
terpreter can be found, pdfroff aborts.
GROFF_AWK_INTERPRETER
Specifies the program to be invoked, when pdfroff is extracting reference dictio-
nary entries from a groff intermediate message stream. If GROFF_AWK_INTERPRETER is
not specified, then pdfroff searches the process PATH, looking for any of the pre-
ferred programs, 'gawk', 'mawk', 'nawk', and 'awk', in this order; if none of these
are found, pdfroff issues a warning message, and continue processing; however, in
this case, no reference dictionary is created.
OSTYPE Typically defined automatically by the operating system, OSTYPE is used on Micro-
soft Win32/MS-DOS platforms only, to infer the default PATH_SEPARATOR character,
which is used when parsing the process PATH to search for external helper programs.
PATH_SEPARATOR
If set, PATH_SEPARATOR overrides the default separator character, (':' on
POSIX/Unix systems, inferred from OSTYPE on Microsoft Win32/MS-DOS), which is used
when parsing the process PATH to search for external helper programs.
SHOW_PROGRESS
If this is set to a non-empty value, then pdfroff always behaves as if the
--report-progress option is specified, on the command line.
FILES
Input and output files for pdfroff may be named according to any convention of the user's
choice. Typically, input files may be named according to the choice of the principal for-
matting macro package, e.g., file.ms might be an input file for formatting using the ms
macros (s.tmac); normally, the final output file should be named file.pdf.
Temporary files, created by pdfroff, are placed in the file system hierarchy, in or below
the directory specified by environment variables (see section "Environment" above). If
mktemp(1) is available, it is invoked to create a private subdirectory of the nominated
temporary files directory, (with subdirectory name derived from the template
pdfroff-XXXXXXXXXX); if this subdirectory is successfully created, the temporary files
will be placed within it, otherwise they will be placed directly in the directory nomi-
nated in the environment.
All temporary files themselves are named according to the convention pdf$$.*, where $$ is
the standard shell variable representing the process ID of the pdfroff process itself, and
* represents any of the extensions used by pdfroff to identify the following temporary and
intermediate files.
pdf$$.tmp
A scratch pad file, used to capture reference data emitted by groff, during the
reference dictionary compilation phase.
pdf$$.ref
The reference dictionary, as compiled in the last but one pass of the reference
dictionary compilation phase; (at the start of the first pass, this file is created
empty; in successive passes, it contains the reference dictionary entries, as col-
lected in the preceding pass).
If the --reference-dictionary=name option is specified, this intermediate file be-
comes permanent, and is named name, rather than pdf$$.ref.
pdf$$.cmp
Used to collect reference dictionary entries during the active pass of the refer-
ence dictionary compilation phase. At the end of any pass, when the content of
pdf$$.cmp compares as identical to pdf$$.ref, (or the corresponding file named by
the --reference-dictionary=name option), then reference dictionary compilation is
terminated, and the document reference map is appended to this intermediate file,
for inclusion in the final formatting passes.
pdf$$.tc
An intermediate PostScript file, in which "Table of Contents" entries are col-
lected, to facilitate relocation before the body text, on ultimate output to the
GhostScript postprocessor.
pdf$$.ps
An intermediate PostScript file, in which the body text is collected prior to ulti-
mate output to the GhostScript postprocessor, in the proper sequence, after
pdf$$.tc.
AUTHORS
pdfroff was written by Keith Marshall <keith.d.marshall AT ntlworld.com>.
SEE ALSO
See groff(1) for the definitive reference to document formatting with groff. Since
pdfroff provides a superset of all groff capabilities, groff(1) may also be considered to
be the definitive reference to all standard capabilities of pdfroff, with this document
providing the reference to pdfroff's extended features.
While pdfroff imposes neither any restriction on, nor any requirement for, the use of any
specific groff macro package, a number of supplied macro packages, and in particular those
associated with the package pdfmark.tmac, are best suited for use with pdfroff as the pre-
ferred formatter. Detailed documentation on the use of these packages may be found, in
PDF format, in the reference guide "Portable Document Format Publishing with GNU Troff",
included in the installed documentation set as /usr/share/doc/groff-base/
pdf/pdfmark.pdf.gz.
groff 1.22.4 23 March 2022 PDFROFF(1)
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On Apache
Under GNU General Public License
2024-12-12 17:08 @13.59.58.61 CrawledBy Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)