Ubuntu Manpage: pdfroff - create PDF documents using groff

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

AUTHORS

       pdfroff was written by Keith Marshall ⟨keith.d.marshall@ntlworld.com⟩.