Posted by mariobl on Mar 22, 2021; 5:36pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/How-to-change-rendering-of-links-in-man-pages-tp8575p8577.html

Thanks for the explanation.

Alexander Schwartz wrote

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.

Good idea, but ...

Your mileage will vary based on Ruby your 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.

... I've neither Ruby nor any other programming language skills. Then it's a job for anyone else, or I accept the current appearance. The mentioned "trying to be consistent with the output produced by a2x" is a bit strange. Who benefits of such a consistent output? In my opinion, Asciidoctor should have a look at the nowadays usual things in *roff, and that is, for example, such a ".MT/.ME" mail address which enables a clickable name in the final HTML output produced by the distributions. But for the time being, I'm OK with this constraint. It's definitely better than sticking with *roff man pages.

Best Regards,
Mario