Re: [MacPerl] POD to PDF translation

[Alan Fry <ajf@afco.demon.co.uk>]

At 7:43 am -0700 07/04/00, Greg Aiken wrote:

>Can you please provide a brief explanation of how you accomplished this, and
>what if any commercial applications one must have installed to use your
>module (eg, does your module somehow control and interact with Distiller or
>PDF Writer?)

No, 'pod2pdf.plx' is a pure Perl script and doesn't need anything 
apart from Perl itself (or MacPerl) to translate a POD file into PDF.

That really was the point of writing it. Its predecessor, pod2ps, 
produces a PostScript file, but not everybody has access to a 
PostScript printer (or RIP). It is possible to turn the PS file into 
PDF with Adobe's "Distiller", but that is not free and not everybody 
has a copy of it. In any case the double run, first into PS and then 
from PS to PDF, is cumbersome and rather slow.

How does it work? Well, the script reads the POD text and parses 
that, formatting the output text according to the rules set out in 
'perlpod.pod'. Then 'pod2pdf' prints out the formatted text according 
to the rules of the PDF language, as set out in the 'PDF Reference 
Manual'.

HTH,

Alan Fry

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