> > > I hope that you write the doc is POD :)
> >
> > I suppose I could... I was planning on having a nice checklist of
> > features/systems that would be a pain to do in a fixed width font. An
> > HTML table would make my life MUCH easier there. Is there something in
> > POD that makes tables easier?
>
> Write the text in POD, and put the checklist data in with some neutral
> format. Then we can use a customized pod2html converter on it to generate
> a pretty table. XML would be a nice way to store the raw data. This
> might end up being kind of big for an in-line, so we could do something
> like "=table data_file.xml" and keep it in a separate file. (Or is it
> better to use "=for html" and put the rest inside that, so that it still
> passes syntax checks for standard POD?)
I believe XML is a way too heavy for docs writing. Why one will want to
get a messy source code, when you can get away with a minimalistic POD.
Just look at the Guide's source code and look at the generated PDF --
isn't it great? I love POD. And if you want more than POD provides, it
takes secs to add the new functionality.
> Stas, do you have code available for the guide generator? That might come
> in handy.
The guide building code was completely rewritten lately. Now it uses HTML
templates (+css) to customize the look and feel, so if you want to roll
your own documentation project you don't have to touch the code anymore.
The html2ps translator is bundled in distribution, so there is no
installation overhead, just grab the package from CPAN:
cpan> install mod_perl_guide
If there will be enough interest, I'll release the package as a standalone
in the future.
As for POD, I've already extended the POD in POD2HTML (which was buggy
anyway). For example, I've added new directives for embedding images,
linking to files and more... I don't afraid to extend the POD since I can
easily convert all my extended pod files back into the standard POD
format. So if you want a syntax for tables, this should be easy to add,
like:
=table args
=tr args
=td args
...
=/td
=/tr
=/table
> Drew, if this all sounds like too much trouble for the first draft and you
> already started in HTML, I'd say just finish that up and we'll distill it
> into POD later. (html2pod?)
Not a good idea :)
_____________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker
http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://perl.org http://stason.org/TULARC
http://singlesheaven.com http://perlmonth.com http://sourcegarden.org
