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5.4.2 Hyperlink driver hypertex

HyperTeX is a standard for inclusion of hyperlink information in TeX (and LaTeX) documents (see http://arxiv.org/hypertex). This standard defines a set of hyperlink tags implemented as \special commands written into the DVI file. The major advantage of such standard is that a single .dvi file containing HyperTeX commands can be viewed by any HyperTeX-enabled viewer (e.g., any more or less modern version of xdvi) or converted to other file formats (e.g., PDF) by any HyperTeX-enabled DVI converter (e.g., dvipdfmx or dvips with Ghostscript's ps2pdf script).

The downside to the standard is that it is by design “the common factor” of other formats supporting hyperlinks, so many features of a particular file format cannot be supported by HyperTeX. Therefore, if you need to use special features of a particular format, HyperTeX is not a good choice. For the PDF file format, Eplain provides the pdftex and dvipdfm drivers which provide fine control over the PDF options (see Hyperlink drivers pdftex and dvipdfm).

For more information on programs which support the HyperTeX standard, please see 

     http://arxiv.org/hypertex
     http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/support/hypertex/hypertex

For convenience, we list a few HyperTeX-enabled converters:

dvips
Note that you need to pass the -z option to dvips to tell it to preserve the information about the hyperlinks. To generate a .pdf file with hyperlinks, you can use the ps2pdf script of Ghostscript. For example, if foo.tex is a TeX file using HyperTeX commands, then 
          prompt$ tex foo.tex
          prompt$ dvips -z foo.dvi -o
          prompt$ ps2pdf foo.ps

will produce foo.pdf with hyperlinks.

dvipdfm
dvipdfmx
No special command line arguments are required, these programs automatically detect the HyperTeX commands.

One more note is in place: support for the HyperTeX commands varies from one previewer/converter to another, so you might need to experiment to see if what you need is supported by the program(s) you intend to use. For example, dvips(k) as of version 5.92b converts all internal hyperlinks into page links pointing to a page containing the destination, so that “exact” linking to destinations is not possible (this was confirmed to be a bug and most probably has already been fixed in later versions of dvips(k)); dvipdfm as of version 0.13.2c and dvipdfmx as of version 20040411 do not correctly parse links to external local files, and produce a URL link instead of a file link.