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Today I decided to learn more about the Template-Toolkit. I am the kind of person that can learn the first steps better when I read things on paper. Reading from screen is fine for me for looking up a reference, but reading long texts is a pain. Regardless if it is a CRT or a TFT display.

The docs of Template Toolkit are, as of many Perl modules, splitted in many small chunks, which is also fine for reference, but a pain to print out.

So I decided to put the stuff together in a Word (/me ducks) file and make a pdf out of it, so i can share it with people. I planned to make it in three parts.

The Manual
The Tutorial
The Reference

The manual and the tutorial consist of a few documents so i did them by hand. I copied the relevant parts from the HTML-doc and inserted them into Word, changed headings, inserted pagebreaks, did some pageformatting and printed it to a pdf.

So far so good. But when I came to the reference I realized that there are far too many files to do it conviniently by hand. Solution: script it.

Here is the script I used for the issue. It uses regexes to deal with the html, but since Active States HTML-Docs are computer generated I think that is ok in this case :-D

my @f = 
(
"c:/perl/html/site/lib/Template.html", 
"c:/perl/html/site/lib/Template/Base.html", 
#... 
"c:/perl/html/site/lib/Template/Plugin/XML/Style.html", 
"c:/perl/html/site/lib/Template/Plugin/XML/XPath.html", 
);

open OUT, ">ref.html";

print OUT <<"HTML";
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w
+3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Template::Config - Factory module for instantiating other TT2 m
+odules</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="Active.css" type="text/css" />
<link rev="made" href="mailto:" />
</head>

<body>
<table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr><td class="block" valign="middle">
<big><strong><span class="block">&nbsp;Template::Config - Factory modu
+le for instantiating other TT2 modules</span></strong></big>
</td></tr>
</table>

<p>
HTML

for my $f ( @f )
{
    #trigger
    $i=0;

    open IN, $f or die "$f: $!";

    while ( <IN> )
    {
        $i=1 if /<!-- INDEX END -->/;
        $i=0 if /<h1><a name="authors?">/;

        #tweak the NAME heading
        my $ff = $f;
        $ff =~ s/^.+Template/Template/;
        $ff =~ s/\.html//;
        $ff =~ s/\//::/g;
        
        s/<h1><a name="name">NAME<\/a><\/h1>/[[[PB!]]]<h0><a name="nam
+e">$ff<\/h0>/;
        s/<hr \/>//g;

        #tweak headings one step smaller
        s/(<\/?h)([0-9])(>)/$1.($2+1).$3/eg;
        
        print OUT $_ if $i;
    }   
}

print OUT "</body></html>";
[download]

That worked fine. All I had to do manually was replacing the [[[PB!]]] parts with pagebreaks using the "search and replace" functionality of Word, formatting the pages and adding a autogenerated Table of Contents. Et voila, a full fledged book. :-)

As you may have noticed, the html relies on a external stylesheet, so you can even tweak the formatting to you your liking.

I will put the six Files (TT-Manual-Single, TT-Manual-Double, TT-Tutorial-Single, TT-Tutorial-Double, TT-Reference-Single and TT-Reference-Double) on my webspace at holli.perlmonk.org as soon as I get home, since I cannot ssh from work.

The difference between "Double" and "Single" here is that one is optimized for double paged print, the other for single page print.

Update:
The files are now available at http://holli.perlmonk.org/TTdocs. There is a 20MB transfer limit per day on jcwren's server, so please be kind if it does not work for you. Just try the other day.

holli, /regexed monk/

In reply to Turning HtmlDoc into Book by holli

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