Re: [Groff] Converting man pages to PDF and links

[Larry Kollar]

Keith Marshall wrote:

> > > .... I'd guess if you're viewing
> > >
> > >    file:///home/andre/man/man3/malloc.pdf
> > >
> > > and it has a link to ../man1/vgrind.pdf then that would work?
>
> Yep.  `.pdfhref L -F path/to/vgrind.pdf -- "text for link hot spot"'

The "fun" starts if you want to make this at all general. A quick  
grep through the manpages on my system turns up a number of ways to  
format references to other pages:

.IR foo (1)
.BR bar (1)
\fBfoor\fR(1) (manual formatting, sloppy)
baz(1) (no highlighting, argh!)
.Xr quux 1 (BSD)

Since you're doing this for your own manpages, you can define a cross- 
ref macro to include in each manpage:

.ds PDFpath path/to/
.\" Usage: Xref name vol trailing
.de Xref
.ie d pdfmark .pdfhref L -F \\*[PDFpath]\\$1.pdf -- "\fB\\$1\fP(\\$2)\ 
\$3"
.el .nop \fB\\$1\fP(\\$2)\\$3
..

Note that I haven't tested the above, but it should be pretty close  
to workable.

-- Larry