Re: Question on hyperlinks in groff

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2022-03-25T18:03:29+0100, Chems Eddine Naimi wrote:
>     I'm pretty new to groff, and I've been playing with the tmac
>     files, writing my own macros and all. Now I'm trying to implement
>     internal links in dvi documents.

Hi Chems,

I didn't even know the DVI format supported hyperlinks, but I guess it
does.[1]  It sounds like they're supported by "hyperlink-html specials",
which I'm going to guess is in the same broad class of extensions as
"tpic specials".

>     When reading the s.tmac file, specifically the description for the
>     .[ macro, it mentions a macro called .#, but I can't find its
>     definition anywhere.

I get the feeling you are not reading groff's s.tmac file.  groff does
not define a macro by that name, and in fact would not because such a
sequence would get replaced by the refer(1) preprocessor.

Similarly, groff's s.tmac does not define a macro called '#'.  (I assume
you're using the dots to indicate the call syntax; in any case, it
doesn't define a macro called '.#' either.)

In fact this symbol is almost unused in groff's ms implementation.

$ grep '#' tmac/refer-ms.tmac tmac/s.tmac
tmac/s.tmac:.mk #T
tmac/s.tmac:.   T#
tmac/s.tmac:.   T#

>I tried greping the whole directory but to no
>     avail. Here's the passage I'm talking about :
> .\" Examples:
> .\"     .[ eBay ]( https://ebay.com )
> .\"     .[ Contact ]< contact@author.com >
> .\"     .[ Term ][ term-id ] *\" See .#*
> External links to sites and e-mails work fine, but I can't find a way
> to declare any term-id for use in internal links.

This doesn't look like idiomatic ms(7) macro package usage at all.

Whatever it is you have here, I don't think it has much to do with
groff.  Can you share a link to the source of the material you're
quoting?

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/314041/hyperlinks-in-plain-tex

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