pdfroff - create PDF documents using groff
[
-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 ...]
-h --help -v [
groff-option ...]
--version
[
groff-option ...]
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
separately, 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 resolve
references, and to expand the dynamically defined content of links.
The command line is parsed in accordance with normal GNU conventions, but with
one exception — 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 independently (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 usage.
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 transparently 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 multiple 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 output, 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
eliminate 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 generate 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 accumulates 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 unspecified, 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.
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 option.
- 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 internal 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
applications 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
considered 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 interpreter can be found, pdfroff
aborts.
- GROFF_AWK_INTERPRETER
- Specifies the program to be invoked, when pdfroff is
extracting reference dictionary 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
preferred 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 Microsoft 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.
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 formatting 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 nominated 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 collected in the
preceding pass).
- If the --reference-dictionary=name option is
specified, this intermediate file becomes permanent, and is named
name, rather than pdf$$.ref.
-
pdf$$.cmp
- Used to collect reference dictionary entries during
the active pass of the reference 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$$.tc
- An intermediate PostScript file, in which
“Table of Contents” entries are collected, to facilitate
relocation before the body text, on ultimate output to the
GhostScript postprocessor.
-
pdf$$.ps
- An intermediate PostScript file, in which the body
text is collected prior to ultimate output to the GhostScript
postprocessor, in the proper sequence, after
pdf$$.tc.
pdfroff was written by
Keith
Marshall
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
preferred 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.