Re: Groff macro to make .UR and .UE links clickable in PDF?

[Jan Stary]

> > - don't set the URL at all in the body of the text but use a
> >   footnote or endnote marker and set the URL in the footnote or
> >   endnote, since these are usually set in a smaller point size
> >   and gives you more flexibility for fitting on lines; if a text
> >   contains a lot of URLS, then set the notes as endnotes in a
> >   longer line length, if possible;
> 
> This would be an ideal solution, if it is possible with groff. When I
> must have a URL visible in the text, I'd love for it to be in small
> text as a footnote. How hard is it to add footnotes to a package like
> mdoc in groff? 

I don't think something like that belongs into mdoc(7) at all.
It's a "semantic markup language for formatting manual pages".
Let it be what is is, and has been for decades.

What is it that you are actualy writing
that you need both the semantic of mdoc
and typeset URLs in footnotes in print?
(I doubt it is a manpage.)

> Thank you, Deri, for providing your pdfman program! I am hoping to
> find a solution using a groff macro instead of a Perl preprocessing
> step, but it does do what I want.
> 
> For those who didn't try pdfman yet, it turns troff like this:
> 
>     The GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation hosts the
>     .UR https://\:www.gnu.org/\:software/\:groff/
>     Groff home page
>     .UE .
> 
> into something like this:
> 
>     .ds PDFHREF.COLOUR 0.0 0.0 0.3
>     .defcolor pdf:href.colour rgb \*[PDFHREF.COLOUR]
>     .ds PDFHREF.TEXT.COLOUR pdf:href.colour
>     The GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation hosts the
>     .pdfhref W -D "https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/"; -A "." -- Groff home 
> page
> 
> This makes the phrase "Groff home page" in the PDF a blue clickable
> link to the proper URL. The URL itself is not shown in the PDF text.

This doesn't seem to have anything to do with mdoc(7).

        Jan