In response to some of this, I am working on a Perl port of the AsciiTeX program. Its almost complete, see more at https://github.com/jberger/Text-AsciiTeX .
Once I get that going then I will have to figure out how to hook into a POD renderer. With this facility text based POD readers can see the formulae too! For POD to LaTeX there seems to be plenty of converter engines, then from there its an easy render to PDF. Cheers, Joel P.S. I will probably make an announcement on blogs.perl.org once its ready (mirrored on perlsphere.net). On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 6:31 AM, chm <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/23/2012 5:12 AM, Matthew Kenworthy wrote: >>>> >>>> (1) we need to have a pod-only option for >>>> the various figures---I'm thinking >>>> ascii art versions with some text >> >> >> I was thinking of using png2ascii or some such variation, because hand >> drawing text figures is painful - something to experiment for >> 2.4.11.... > > > If you look at the pure pod version, we at least > need to have a box with words in it to fill the > same space. > > >>>> >>>> (2) we need a way to have TeX/LaTeX/... >>>> equations and symbols in the documents >>>> at least for the HTML and PDF versions. >>> >>> >> >> We shouldn't have to use TeX equations to explain PDL. It's no problem >> to add the tex in the POD, but it really shouldn't be an *essential* >> part of the Book. > > > It is very difficult to do a text about computation > and science/engineering while avoiding the language > of science---mathematics. It is _essential_ to provide > at some point: options include standardize to LaTeX > equations and generate images to include them, there > is a math-html for web browsers that could be used, > ... > > >>> I tried to update the make_book.pl script >>> but when it ran it dies on my cygwin >>> system because of an out of memory failure. >>> Is there a way to generate the PDF files >>> in a less intensive fashion? Maybe by >>> chapter and then combine? >> >> >> Holy crow! It runs with no problem on Mac Lion, so I'm not sure what >> the cause may be for you. But I'm happy to switch to something else >> for PDF generation. > > > Nothing holy, just memory limitations of cygwin. > I just reported the problem as it would be an > issue on machines with smaller memory---like the > 256MB laptop I have across the room... > > >> The only hangup with making individual PDFs is the final merge, which >> adds another dependency and also loses the page numbering. > > > This sort of thing is why we'll eventually want more > control of the PDF conversion process with our own > code. > > --Chris > > > _______________________________________________ > Perldl mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
