At 16:06 18.02.2001 +0100, Frank Mittelbach wrote: >Sebastian Rahtz writes: > > the classic example is link breaking. if you have a long bit of text > > to make into a link, pdftex can break it into multiple links, amd > > linebreak nicely. dvi-based methods just crawl away in despair and make > > a long unbroken link. People do claim they could break links at the dvi > > level, but I don't think anyone has actually done it > >is that technically very different from providing, say, color support at dvi >level? i mean if i say \textcolor{red}{this text is in red} and my text gets >broken across the line by TeX all that TeX does is providing some \special at >the begin and end of this text (ie they fall onto two different >lines). For color support, \specials at the begin and the end are enough. Here a graphics attribute is set at the begin and the previous color is set at the end of the group. However, a link region has to be a rectangle (the normal annotations in PDF 1.2) and the coordinates have to be known or calculated. This is easy, if the link is put in a \hbox. At TeX level \special markers at the lower left and upper right corners can be put in the dvi. At PostScript level the dimensions and absolute position of the rectangle are calculated by the help of the PostScript command currentpoint (I do not know a similar command in TeX). This technique is used by pdfmark (dvips) driver of hyperref. The problem arises, if the link does not fit the current line, but is broken across lines. Then in most cases the link area is not a rectangle like this paragraph as an example. PdfTeX does know, that there are line breaks and it knows about all boxes that are part of the link. So it generates _multiple_ links, one for each line, that is part of the link. But how to collect the informations in the TeX/dvips case? I do know about \vadjust to put a special between the first and second lines of a multiple line link, but how to get the heights of the next lines? And, especially, how to get the informations about the x coordinates of the lines? Regards Heiko <[log in to unmask]> PS: The next big problem is a page break that can occur in a link, that is broken across lines. In the pdfTeX case, the headline of the next page will become part of the link.