Re: Observations using utmac

[John Gardner]

>
> It will work when using neatpost and ps2pdf. Neatpdf is great, but as
> far as I know, it does not support pdf links yet.


It doesn't have to. You can embed PDF-specific features by using PostScript's
pdfmark operator
<https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdfmark_reference.pdf>,
supported in nearly every PostScript interpreter since the conception of
PDF. The PostScript code  looks like this:

[   /Dest    /revision-note
    /Rect    [358632 -248700 361632 -239700]
    /Color   [0 0 1]
    /BS      << /S/U/W 0.1 >>
    /Subtype /Link
    /ANN     pdfmark


(It starts at `[` and ends at `pdfmark`. PostScript, being a stack-based
concatenative language, is written in reverse—operands first, operators
last).


On Sun, 1 Nov 2020 at 21:42, Pierre-Jean Fichet <
pierrejean.fichet@posteo.net> wrote:

> Hello Johann,
>
> Johann Höchtl<johann.hoechtl@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I used the wonderful utmac-macro set on an arbitrary text which is in
> > the PD. I admit it was more like playing to discover the possibilities
> > of troff and utmac.
> > I made some observations I would like to show / discuss.
>
> Thank you for your feedback and the effort made to install and test
> utmac. Please, note that utmac is not supported by troff and groff
> communities. It's only the macro set I use, and that I published
> because of the efforts that came into it. As far as I know, I'm the
> only one using them.
>
> > Attached is the source file [...] The resulting pdf as well.
>
> I'm joining here a fixed source file, and the pdf produced by the
> makefile joined in utmac/demo.
>
> Here follow some explanations:
>
> > p9 / p10, last paragraph: left aligned without a macro request
>
> The .PP macro, which introduces a paragraph is mandatory, even after a
> heading. Without it, there are unexpected results.
>
> > p1: In the toc Table of content is written although there is no TOC
> heading.
>
> To get an ordinary TOC, one should use the .XT macro. This macro comes
> with a TOC heading, but only works at the end of a document.
>
> The summary macros are made to produce summaries, which are not
> exactly table of contents, but a summary of a chapter. In your
> document, it would be more semantically correct to use the .S3 macro.
>
>
> > p1: Lots of space to the left for the toc.
>
> The S3 macro produces correct results. There's obviously a bug since
> the S* macro should work too. I'll have to investigate this one.
>
> There are also odd behaviours with the page number not being right
> aligned after hyphenated words. That's a glitch I thought fixed, but
> which is obviously resisting me.
>
> > General: The toc is interlinked but clicking on a xref-item doesn't
> > bring me to the item.
>
> It will work when using neatpost and ps2pdf. Neatpdf is great, but as
> far as I know, it does not support pdf links yet.
>
> > p2: widow
> > p3: widow
>
> Utmac does not fixes widows and orphans automatically. But it should
> detect them, and inform the user at generation time. How to fix widows
> and orphans is a discussion on itself, but my opinion is that manual
> intervention is the best way to fix them.
>
> Thank you for your feedback!
> Pierre-Jean.
>