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Name | Synopsis | Description | Usage | Options | Environment | Files | Authors | See also | COLOPHON |
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pdfroff(1) General Commands Manual pdfroff(1)
pdfroff - construct files in Portable Document Format using groff
pdfroff [groff-option] [--emit-ps] [--no-toc-relocation]
[--no-kill-null-pages] [--stylesheet=name]
[--no-pdf-output] [--pdf-output=name]
[--no-reference-dictionary] [--reference-dictionary=name]
[--report-progress] [--keep-temporary-files] [file ...]
pdfroff -h
pdfroff --help
pdfroff -v [groff-option ...]
pdfroff --version [groff-option ...]
groff-option is any short option supported by groff(1) except for
-h, -T, and -v; see section “Usage” below.
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 “style sheet” capability is provided; this allows for the
definition of content which is required to precede the table of
contents, in the published document.
For each invocation of pdfroff, the ultimate groff output stream
is post-processed by the Ghostscript gs(1) 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 performs 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.
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 unambiguous initial
substring.
Otherwise, 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.
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 breaks 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 causes 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.
--emit-ps
Suppresses the final output conversion step, causing
pdfroff to emit PostScript output instead of PDF. This may
be useful to capture intermediate PostScript output when
using a specialised postprocessor, such as gpresent for
example, in place of the default Ghostscript PDF writer.
--keep-temporary-files
Suppresses the deletion of temporary files, which normally
occurs after pdfroff has completed PDF document formatting;
this may be useful when debugging formatting problems.
See section “Files” below for a description of the
temporary files used by pdfroff.
--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 contains 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.
--no-kill-null-pages
While preparing for simulation of the manual collation
step, which is traditionally required to relocate a table
of contents to the start of a document, pdfroff accumulates
a number of empty page descriptions into the intermediate
PostScript output stream. During the final collation step,
these empty pages are normally discarded from the finished
document; this option forces pdfroff to leave them in
place.
--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.
The following environment variables may be set, and exported, to
modify the behaviour of pdfroff.
PDFROFF_COLLATE
Specifies the program to be used for collation of the
finished PDF document.
This collation step may be required to move tables of
contents to the start of the finished PDF document, when
formatting with traditional macro packages, which print
them at the end. However, users should not normally need
to specify PDFROFF_COLLATE, (and indeed, are not encouraged
to do so). If unspecified, pdfroff uses sed(1) by default,
which normally suffices.
If PDFROFF_COLLATE is specified, then it must act as a
filter, accepting a list of file name arguments, and write
its output to the standard output stream, whence it is
piped to the PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND, to produce the
finished PDF output.
When specifying PDFROFF_COLLATE, it is normally necessary
to also specify PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES.
PDFROFF_COLLATE is ignored, if pdfroff is invoked with the
--no-kill-null-pages option.
PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES
Specifies options to be passed to the PDFROFF_COLLATE
program.
It should not normally be necessary to specify
PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES. The internal default is a sed(1)
script, which is intended to remove completely blank pages
from the collated output stream, and which should be
appropriate in most applications of pdfroff. However, if
any alternative to sed(1) is specified for PDFROFF_COLLATE,
then it is likely that a corresponding alternative
specification for PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES is required.
As in the case of PDFROFF_COLLATE, PDFROFF_KILL_NULL_PAGES
is ignored, if pdfroff is invoked with the
--no-kill-null-pages option.
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND
Specifies the command to be used for the final document
conversion from PostScript intermediate output to PDF. It
must behave as a filter, writing its output to the standard
output stream, and must accept an arbitrary number of files
... arguments, with the special case of “-” representing
the standard input stream.
If unspecified, PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND defaults to
gs -dBATCH -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sOutputFile=-
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 are created in the current
directory.
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER
Specifies the program to be invoked when pdfroff converts
groff PostScript output to PDF. If
PDFROFF_POSTPROCESSOR_COMMAND is specified, then the
command name it specifies is implicitly assigned to
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER, overriding any explicit
setting specified in the environment. If
GROFF_GHOSTSCRIPT_INTERPRETER is not specified, then
pdfroff searches 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 aborts.
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 searches the process PATH,
looking for any of the preferred programs, gawk, mawk,
nawk, and awk, in that order; if none of these are found,
pdfroff issues a warning message, and continue processing;
however, in this case, no reference dictionary is 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 always
behaves as if the --report-progress option is specified on
the command line.
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 normatting 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 file system
hierarchy, in or below the directory specified by environment
variables (see section “Environment” above). If mktemp(1) is
available, it is invoked to create a private subdirectory of the
nominated temporary files directory, (with subdirectory name
derived from the template pdfroff-XXXXXXXXXX); if this
subdirectory is successfully created, the temporary files will be
placed within it, otherwise they will be placed directly in the
directory nominated in the environment.
All temporary files themselves are named according to the
convention pdf$$.*, where $$ is the standard shell variable
representing the process identifier of the pdfroff process itself,
and * represents any of the extensions used by pdfroff to identify
the following temporary and intermediate files.
pdf$$.tmp
A scratch pad file, used to capture reference data emitted
by groff, during the reference dictionary compilation
phase.
pdf$$.ref
The reference dictionary, as compiled in the last but one
pass of the reference dictionary compilation phase; (at the
start of the first pass, this file is created empty; in
successive passes, it contains the reference dictionary
entries, as collected in the preceding pass).
If the --reference-dictionary=name option is specified,
this intermediate file becomes permanent, and is named
name, rather than pdf$$.ref.
pdf$$.cmp
Used to collect reference dictionary entries during the
active pass of the reference dictionary compilation phase.
At the end of any pass, when the content of pdf$$.cmp
compares as identical to pdf$$.ref, (or the corresponding
file named by the --reference-dictionary=name option), then
reference dictionary compilation is terminated, and the
document reference map is appended to this intermediate
file, for inclusion in the final formatting passes.
pdf$$.tc
An intermediate PostScript file, in which “Table of
Contents” entries are collected, to facilitate relocation
before the body text, on ultimate output to the Ghostscript
postprocessor.
pdf$$.ps
An intermediate PostScript file, in which the body text is
collected prior to ultimate output to the Ghostscript
postprocessor, in the proper sequence, after pdf$$.tc.
pdfroff was written by Keith Marshall ⟨keith.d.marshall@ntlworld
.com⟩, who maintains it at his groff-pdfmark OSDN site
⟨https://osdn.net/users/keith/pf/groff-pdfmark/wiki/FrontPage⟩.
groff's version may be withdrawn in a future release.
Groff: The GNU Implementation of troff, by Trent A. Fisher and
Werner Lemberg, is the primary groff manual. You can browse it
interactively with “info groff”.
Since pdfroff provides a superset of all groff capabilities, the
above manual, or its terser reference page, groff(7) may also be
considered definitive references 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.
/usr/local/share/doc/groff-1.23.0/pdf/pdfmark.pdf
“Portable Document Format Publishing with GNU Troff”, by
Keith Marshall, offers detailed documentation on the use of
these packages. This file, together with its source,
pdfmark.ms, is part of the groff distribution.
This page is part of the groff (GNU troff) project. Information
about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩. If you have a bug report for
this manual page, see ⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/⟩. This
page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/groff.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At
that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
the repository was 2025-08-09.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
[email protected]
groff 1.23.0.1273-9d53-dirty 6 June 2024 pdfroff(1)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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