Dear monks,

I'd like to profit from your experience. Here is the story:

I was tester for Alan Fry's Pod2Pdf. This module does a very good but somehow limited job. Alan developed it for Mac users because the MacPerl companion Shuck for viewing POD documentation cannot print. He produces a well formatted and printer ready PDF without using commercial tools, very handy.

On the other hand I love (hate) LaTeX. The "pod2latex" script from the standard Perl distribution is outdated and not maintainable I think. This is because it sends the POD text through Pod::Plainer and then parses itself. The handcrafted parser is a big puzzle, running without strict, ... my life would be too short to understand the code.

A dutch guy developed some nice enhancements ("pod2ltx"). He uses pod2latex code and sends the LaTeX output through "pdflatex" which generates very nice PDFs (bookmarks, hyperlinks, table of contents, index). I tried to contribute to this script but stopped for he still relies on the old parsing code and because I discovered Pod::LaTeX. Now responsibility for parsing is within that module, part of the core distribution and much more flexible.

Pod::LaTeX lacks some features though. For instance I really want to have 8 bit european characters output when the author uses his natural language. Not many authors really care to write "E<lt>", they simply use "<" in the Pod. Some important information must be extracted from .xs files.

Now it is relatively easy to develop a wrapper script which preprocesses pod files parses with Pod::LaTeX and starts the whole LaTeX engine.

Why I ask here is simply because I can imagine quite a few number of knowledgable people did something similar to create a nice PDF from POD.

What do you think?


Best regards, Axel.

In reply to pod-latex-pdf by axelrose

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