[tex-eplain] Hyperlinks in Eplain

[geolsoft at mail.ru]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 12:33:40PM -0400, Karl Berry wrote:
> Can one get live hyperlinks in a pdf made via dvips|ps2pdf?  I have
> never been clear about this.  If so, dvips should be the default.

I think so but never actually tried it.  In `dvips.pdf'
(dvips documentation) there is something about this in
section `5.4 HyperTeXt', though I believe their support is
more limited than pdfTeX's or dvipdfm's.  You can only set
`URL targets' and create `URL links' (URL can actually point
to a location in a document), no fancy destination / link
options (I might be wrong).

>     Imagine we do fall back on dvipdfm driver but instead of using
>     dvipdfm, user will use some other .dvi converter which also issues
>     warnings on unknown specials.  Won't it be annoying to have these
>     warnings?
> 
> I don't think so; instead, it will be informative, telling the user that
> they should specify a different driver, since our guessed default was wrong.
> 
> For this reason, I think nolinks is useful.  If a user has to use some
> unsupported-by-us driver xyz which generates the warnings, it would
> provide a way to turn the warnings off.

Still this whole affair seems confusing to me.  The user
_requests_ pdftex but we do not find it running, and on
these grounds we fall back to _another_ driver dvipdfm
(which could have been requested specifically if the user
wanted it in the first place).  IMHO this is a little bit
intrusive.  To me there seem to be only two logical options:

 1) warn the user and do nothing, hoping the user knows
    better, which he/she/it usually does not :) ;

 2) [warn the user and] fall back to nolinks since we are
    not sure that the links can be produced in the state we
    are in (and let the user convince us to the contrary).

Am I missing another obvious option here?

-- 
Best regards,
Oleg Katsitadze