[luatex] \pdfstartlink/\pdfextension startlink and QuadPoints

Joseph Wright joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk
Wed Apr 17 22:50:42 CEST 2019


Hello all,

Working on some low-level support for hyperlinks, I've come across the 
hypdivps package (https://ctan.org/pkg/hypdvips). It's largely about 
doing stuff in DVI mode that pdfTeX/LuaTeX in PDF mode can do anyway. 
However, there is one PDF feature that hypdvips can use that doesn't 
seem to show up in pdfTeX or LuaTeX: QuadPoints.

Briefly, QuadPoints allow an annotation to an area defined by multiple 
rectangles contained within the outer /Rect boundary. The usefulness 
appears when breaking a link across lines: using QuadPoints, this is a 
single object rather than multiple ones. pdfTeX and LuaTeX handle 
breaking links and creation of the necessary annotations, but don't do 
that using QuadPoints. I wonder if this was

- Never considered
- Considered but not at the time feasible (viewer support?)
- Considered but too complex to implement
- Tried but buggy or otherwise defective

Does anyone have any insight? I can see only one mention of QuadPoints 
on the pdfTeX list 
(https://tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2007-February/007028.html).

Joseph


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