Posted by Alexander Schwartz on Mar 21, 2021; 1:45pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/How-to-change-rendering-of-links-in-man-pages-tp8575p8576.html

Hi,

looking at the source code of Asciidoctor man page backend converter the output you see can't be configured. Reading the comment at the beginning of the file, it is "trying to be consistent with the output produced by the a2x tool from AsciiDoc Python".

As the backends of Asciidoctor are plugable, you might be able to extend the existing converter and override convert_inline_anchor to do what you want to do.

Your mileage will vary based on your Ruby knowledge. To allow the downstream packages to convert AsciiDoc to man pages, you'll need to ship your extended backend with the rest of your sources.

Although this is not a full solution, I hope the shape of one possible solution emerges.