A Hypertext System with Controlled Hype

Hype is an X– based previewer for troff documents. It offers support for hypertext commands that can either be embedded into the troff sources or issued by independent UNIX® commands, while the previewer is running. The embedded commands leave tags in the troff output that are interpreted by hype, but are invisible to other previewers and to devices such as line-printers and typesetters. Issuing the commands at run-time make it possible to add hyper-text support to any troff document, without modification of the sources. The information required to built hypertext support of this type can be extracted from the raw troff-ouput files with a few simple post-processing tools that will be discussed.