pdfroff(1) General Commands Manual pdfroff(1)
Name
pdfroff - construct files in Portable Document Format using groff
Synopsis
pdfroff [groff-option] [--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 ...]
groff-option is any short option supported by groff(1) except for -h,
-T, and -v; see section "Usage" below.
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 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 gs(1) 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.
Usage
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.
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 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.
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 standard output 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 standard output
stream, and must accept an arbitrary number of files ...
arguments, with the special case of "-" representing the
standard input 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 that 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.
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 normatting 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 identifier 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.
Authors
pdfroff was written by Keith Marshall <keith.d.marshall@ntlworld.com>,
who maintains it at his groff-pdfmark OSDN site <https://osdn.net/
users/keith/pf/groff-pdfmark/wiki/FrontPage>. groff's version may be
withdrawn in a future release.
See also
Groff: The GNU Implementation of troff, by Trent A. Fisher and Werner
Lemberg, is the primary groff manual. You can browse it interactively
with "info groff".
Since pdfroff provides a superset of all groff capabilities, the above
manual, or its terser reference page, groff(7) may also be considered
definitive references 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.
/opt/local/share/doc/groff-1.23.0/pdf/pdfmark.pdf
"Portable Document Format Publishing with GNU Troff", by Keith
Marshall, offers detailed documentation on the use of these
packages. This file, together with its source, pdfmark.ms, is
part of the groff distribution.
groff 1.23.0 2 July 2023 pdfroff(1)
groff 1.23.0 - Generated Sat Dec 23 08:51:41 CST 2023