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⟩.