man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Jeff Conrad]

A major drawback to manual pages formatted using the man macros is the
lack of bookmarks in a PDF file.  A quick and dirty way to get bookmarks
appears to be adding

.am SH
.pdfbookmark 1 "\&\\$*"
..
.am SS
.pdfbookmark 2 "\&\\$*"
..

to the beginning of the man page source (the PDFHREF.VIEW.LEADING
register needs a slight increase to make the heading texts visible when
clicking a bookmark).

But this results in the message

    "... can't transparently output node at top level";

if there are many sections and subsections, there are a lot of messages.
It doesn't seem to cause much harm--the PDF bookmarks are duly created--
but the messages are distracting, and may make it easier to miss a real
error.  I don't get the messages if I call pdfbookmark directly from the
man page source rather than adding them to the macros; this certainly is
a solution, but it does require a fair bit of extra coding that adds
clutter to the document source.

I've looked at pdfmark.tmac and a couple of the groff source files, but
haven't been able to figure out what's happening.

I get the same message using spdf (e.g., formatting the pdfmark
reference manual); is this just something one does not worry about?

Jeff Conrad