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 a 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 an ASCII 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 build a translator which transforms ASCII into the output format of your choice? Thats what PerlPoint::Parser is made for. It performs the first translation step by parsing ASCII and transforming it into an intermediate stream format, which can then be processed by a subsequently called translator backend. By separating parsing and output generation we get the flexibility to write as many backends as necessary by using the same parser frontend for all translators. This package provides *both* the parser module *and* a backend framework class. INSTALLATION As usual: unpack and run "make test" and "make install distclean". To install pp2sdf, just copy it from the demo directory and add an appropriate shebang line. DOCUMENTATION Documentation for translator *authors* is provided in the modules in POD format (see PerlPoint::Parser, PerlPoint::Backend and PerlPoint::Constants). 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. 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 appretiate 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 and Norbert Gruener who became our first testers outside the team and helped us by their usage reports. Special thanks to Alex for propagating the toolkit and his help to publish the software! AUTHOR Copyright (c) Jochen Stenzel (perl@jochen-stenzel.de), 1999-2000. 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 =head1 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.