Re: hyperlinks in PostScript

[Ted Harding]

On 03-Jun-00 rafal polonski wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 03, 2000 at 02:12:03PM +0100, Jeffrey Howard Kingston
> wrote:
>> 
>> Does anyone know how to get hyperlinks in
>> PostScript?  I thought there was a feature
>> called pdfmark to do it, but when I browsed
>> through the 3rd edition of the Red Book on
>> Adobe's web site, I couldn't see any sign
>> of it.
> 
> Check the pdfmark Primer - fragment from "Web Publishing with
> Acrobat/PDF" book by Thomas Merz. Full of examples nice text about this
> Postscript extension to manage PDF side.
> 
> http://www.pdflib.com/pdfmark/index.html

Interesting URL, this http://www.pdflib.com -- thanks!

In fact you can find Adobe documentation for pdfmark.

  pdfmark.pdf   "pdfmark Reference Manual" Tech Note #5150 (98 pp)

  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/DOCS/pdfmark.pdf

(This has an "Examples" section at the end which is very useful)


It is also worth getting, in any case,

  pdfspec.pdf   "Portable Document Format Reference Manual"
                Version 1.3 (518 pp)

  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/DOCS/pdfspec.pdf


See also a host of other documents in

  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/technotes.html
 

"pdfmark" is, as far as I know, not part of standard PostScript
at any Level, which is why you won't find it in the Red Book.
Indeed, using "pdfmark" in PostScript documents requires an initial
PS definition of pdfmark to be equivalent to "no-op", though the
recommended Adobe incantation for this allows for the possibility
that a particular PS implementation may recognise it natively:

/pdfmark where {pop} {userdict /pdfmark /cleartomark load put} ifelse

It is the PS->PDF converter which looks out for "pdfmark" and
acts accordingly, and this action has nothing much to do with
PostScript as such. The "pdfmark" tag is designed to be interpreted
by Adobe's Acrobat Distiller (which is the only PS->PDF converter
I know which does a truly clean job, though ghostscript's ps2pdf
is not bad).

I hope this helps,
Ted.

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Date: 03-Jun-00                                       Time: 19:43:23
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