Fortran Standard Search

fss is a small shell script searching a string in the titles of the subsections of the Fortran standard, and opening the pages in a PDF viewer. It is based on pdfgrep, cut and okular (evince can also be used).

You can use the PDF of the official ISO standard or a J3 working document (see https://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/). Put the path to the PDF in the standard constant at the top of the script and the page of the index in the index_page constant. You can also configure your PDF viewer with the viewer and vieweropts constants.

You can search for example the ABS intrinsic by typing:

$ ./fss abs
355:15     16.9.2        ABS (A)
547:9      C.2.4     Abstract types (7.5.7.1)
583:19     C.10.3      Abstract interfaces and procedure pointer components (15.4, 7.5)

The script will call the Okular PDF viewer and open each of the pages shown in the results (here pages 355, 547, 583).

To exclude the two false results, we could also use the fact that in the standard there is generally a space between the name of the functions and the parenthesis:

$ ./fss "abs "
355:15     16.9.2        ABS (A)

Note that your search pattern is a regex. A consequence is that you should for example escape a parenthesis:

$ ./fss "abs \("
355:15     16.9.2        ABS (A)

Options

• -h will print fss usage.

Notes

• fss uses the --ignore-case option of pdfgrep.
• If no string is passed, fss opens the index of the standard.
• If the string is not found, fss opens the index of the standard.
• With GNOME Evince and its -i option, if there are several results only one page will be opened.
• This script could be used with any other PDF document with the same kind of section numbering and naming.
• In FreeBSD 13.1, pdfgrep is available but unhappily it says that PCRE support was disabled at compilation time. Evince and Okular are available, but also xreader which have a -i option like Evince.

TODO

• An --ignore-case option could be added as it could be useful to take case into account (the Fortran intrinsics are generally in uppercase in the standard).

References

• Discussion at the origin of this project: https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/navigating-the-fortran-standard-document/4597
• https://pdfgrep.org/
• https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html#cut-invocation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software#Linux_and_Unix
• https://okular.kde.org/
• https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince
• https://man.archlinux.org/man/xreader.1.en