dvips: Hypertext specials
5.4.2 Hypertext specials
------------------------
Current support for the World Wide Web in the TeX system does not
involve modifying TeX itself. We need only define some specials; Arthur
Smith (<apsmith@aps.org>), Tanmoy Bhattacharya, and Paul Ginsparg
originally proposed and implemented the following:
html:<a href="XURL">
html:<a name="NAME">
html:</a>
html:<img src="XURL">
html:<base href="XURL">
Like all TeX '\special''s, these produce no visible output, and are
uninterpreted by TeX itself. They are instructions to DVI processors
only.
Here, XURL is a standard WWW uniform resource locator (URL), possibly
extended with a '#TYPE.STRING' construct, where TYPE is 'page',
'section', 'equation', 'reference' (for bibliographic references),
'figure', 'table', etc. For example,
\special{html:<a href="http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~tim/ch1.dvi#equation.1.1">}
is a link to equation (1.1) in an example document by Tim Murphy.
See the URL
<http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/Addressing.html> for a
precise description of base URL's.
Descriptions of the '\special''s:
'href'
Creates links in your TeX document. For example:
\special{html:<a href="http://www.tug.org/">}\TeX\ Users
Group\special{html:</a>}
The user will be able to click on the text 'TeX Users Group' while
running Xdvi and get to the TUG home page. (By the way, this is
for illustration. In practice, you most likely want to use macros
to insert the '\special' commands; reference above.)
'name'
Defines URL targets in your TeX documents, so links can be
resolved. For example:
\special{html:<a name="paradise">}Paradise\special{html:</a>}
is exactly where you are right now.
This will resolve an 'href="#paradise"'. You'll also have to
change the catcode of '#', etc. It's usually easiest to use
existing macro packages which take care of all the details, such as
'hyperref' for LaTeX. The HyperTeX FAQ
(http://arxiv.org/hypertex/) has more information.
'img'
Links to an arbitrary external file. Interactively, a viewer is
spawned to read the file according to the file extension and your
'mailcap' file (see the Xdvi documentation).
'base'
Defines a base URL that is prepended to all the 'name' targets.
Typically unnecessary, as the name of the DVI file being read is
used by default.
The 'img' and 'base' tags are not yet implemented in Dvips or the
NeXTSTEP DVI viewer.