Aw: Re: Heirloom Troff for NetBSD (was: Removing ARCNET stuffs)

[carsten.kunze%arcor.de@localhost]

"James K. Lowden" <jklowden%schemamania.org@localhost> wrote:

> I didn't know Heirloom Troff produces PDFs directly, a feature I think
> is very valuable.  In that case, is there any reason not to substitute
> it for groff, apart from some engineering work and possibly some
> touch-up to a few documents?  

It does product PDF directly, if you pipe the output of dpost(1) to e.g. "ps2pdf - <PDF filename>" :-)

But it can put additional information for the PDF generation into the PS document with the pdfmark operator.  This way e.g. hyperlinks and also bookmarks can be included (the table of contents that PDF viewers show on the left side).  So the result has the features which had been addressed in this thread.  I usually don't generate a PS document (but use the pipe to ps2pdf) because of the size of PS files.

Drawback is that ghostscript has a GNU license.

Carsten