INTRO Welcome! This package provides modules to write PerlPoint translator software. The PerlPoint format, initially designed by *Tom Christiansen*, is intended to provide a simple and portable way to generate slides without the need of a proprietary product. Slides can be prepared in a text editor of your choice, generated on any platform where you find perl, and presented by any browser which can render the chosen output format. To sum it up, Perl Point Software takes a text and transforms it into slides written in a certain document description language. This is, by tradition, usually HTML, but you may decide to use another target format like XML, SGML, TeX or whatever you want. Well, this sounds fine, but how to write a translator which transforms ASCII into the output format of your choice? Thats what this package is for. It provides a general converter (pp2tdo) which can be easily extended by own formatter modules to produce what you want. Additionally, the included base framework allows to write complete converters like pp2tdo itself, or like the already existing pp2sdf, pp2html, pp2latex etc. INSTALLATION As usual: unpack and run "make test" and "make install distclean". This will install both the module set (various PerlPoint::... modules) and the translator pp2sdf. If you are using CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS, try to install Bundle::PerlPoint to get all PerlPoint related packages at once. DOCUMENTATION Documentation for translator *authors* is provided in the modules in POD format (see PerlPoint::Parser, PerlPoint::Backend and PerlPoint::Constants). Additionally, there is a PerlPoint document "writing-converters.pp" in the doc subdirectory which may be converted by your preferred converter. Base documentation for translator *users* is provided in PerlPoint (see the doc subdirectory). This basic documentation is intended as a startup help to translator authors to write specific documentation. It describes general aspects and can be directly included into translator specific PerlPoint documents by \INCLUDE. KNOWN TRANSLATOR SOFTWARE Translators using this package are *pp2html* and *pp2latex* by Lorenz Domke. A *pp2sdf* software comes with this package itself, see the demo directory. As mentioned above, all PerlPoint related packages including Lorenz' converters can be installed via CPAN.pm as Bundle::PerlPoint. DEMO TRANSLATORS The demo directory contains several converters on base of this package. Except for pp2sdf which serves as a reference implementation, these are just illustrations intended to show how the package can be used. So they are not fully functional but really worth a look. To run pp2ppresenter, XML::Generator needs to be installed. If someone wants to take over the demos to make them full featured converters provided in an own CPAN package, feel free to do so. Just let me know. SUPPPORT A PerlPoint mailing list is set up to discuss usage, ideas, bugs, suggestions and translator development. To subscribe, please send an empty message to perlpoint-subscribe@perl.org. If you prefer, you can contact me via perl@jochen-stenzel.de as well. CREDITS Thanks to Tom Christiansen for the idea and first implementation of PerlPoint! And special thanks for his permission to use this name for our new implementation. Thanks to Lorenz Domke who begun to extend the initial software. I think I was the "main tester and user" besides himself. Finally I started to think about various output formats and a parser and he agreed to transform pp2html to the new model. I appreciate his cowork in language design and testing. In fact, this project grew up in two parts: the module package and first translators Lorenz wrote on its base (pp2html, pp2latex). Great teamwork! Thanks to Stephen Riehm who shared his ideas of extensions for the original software with us. The final language was basically designed by a team of Lorenz, him and me. Thanks to Alex Sigel, Norbert Gruener and Jeffrey S. Haemer who became our first users outside the team and helped us by their usage reports and suggestions. Special thanks to Alex for propagating the toolkit and his help to publish the software! Thanks to Johan Vromans and Mark Overmeer for the PerlPoint brainstorming meeting at the 3rd German Workshop. Various ideas came up there and are still making their way into the software. Thanks to Benjamin Holzmann for XML::Generator and his very fast help and patches. AUTHOR Copyright (c) Jochen Stenzel (perl@jochen-stenzel.de), 1999-2003. All rights reserved. This module is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License distributed with Perl version 5.003 or (at your option) any later version. Please refer to the Artistic License that came with your Perl distribution for more details. The Artistic License should have been included in your distribution of Perl. It resides in the file named "Artistic" at the top-level of the Perl source tree (where Perl was downloaded/unpacked - ask your system administrator if you dont know where this is). Alternatively, the current version of the Artistic License distributed with Perl can be viewed on-line on the World-Wide Web (WWW) from the following URL: http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html. DISCLAIMER This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but is provided "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either expressed or implied, INCLUDING, without limitation, the implied warranties of MERCHANTABILITY and FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. The ENTIRE RISK as to the quality and performance of the software IS WITH YOU (the holder of the software). Should the software prove defective, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. IN NO EVENT WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY CREATE, MODIFY, OR DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE BE LIABLE OR RESPONSIBLE TO YOU OR TO ANY OTHER ENTITY FOR ANY KIND OF DAMAGES (no matter how awful - not even if they arise from known or unknown flaws in the software). Please refer to the Artistic License that came with your Perl distribution for more details.