PDFROFF(1)

NAME
pdfroff - create PDF documents using groff

SYNOPSIS
file ...

-h | --help

-v | --version [option ...]

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 unambigous initial substring.

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 capability is provided; this allows for the definition of content which is required to preceed 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 will perform 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
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 will break 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 will cause 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.

--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 will contain 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.

--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.

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 will be created in the current directory.

GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER
    Specifies the program to be invoked, when pdfroff converts groff PostScript output to PDF. If GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER is not specified, then pdfroff will search 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 will abort.

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 will search 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 will issue a warning message, and continue processing; however, in this case, no reference dictionary will be 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 will always behave 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 directory specified by environment variables (see section ENVIRONMENT), and 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 a number of extensions used by pdfroff for temporary and intermediate files.

SEE ALSO
See groff(1) for the definitive reference to document formatting with groff. Since pdfroff provides a superset of all groff capabilities, groff(1) may also be considered to be the definitive reference to all standard capabilities of pdfroff, with this document providing the reference to pdfroff's extended features.

While pdfroff imposes neither any restriction on, nor any requirement for, the use of any specific groff macro package, a number of supplied macro packages, and in particular those associated with the package pdfmark.tmac, are best suited for use with pdfroff as the preferred formatter. Detailed documentation on the use of these packages may be found, in PDF format, in the reference guide “Portable Document Format Publishing with GNU Troff”, included in the installed documentation set as /usr/doc/groff-1.19.2/pdf/pdfmark.pdf.

AUTHOR
Copyright © 2005, Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This man page is distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), version 1.1 or later, and is part of the GNU troff software package. It was originally written by Keith Marshall, who also wrote the implementation of the pdfroff program, to which it relates.

You should have received a copy of the FDL as part of the GNU troff distribution; it is also available on-line, at the GNU site,