On Monday 26 June 2006 20:49, Chris Devers wrote: > On Mon, 26 Jun 2006, Greg London wrote: > > That's the ideal solution, anyway. > > Anything like this exist? > > Pointers? URL's? Hints? > > Write it in POD? > > I'm not aware of any POD based Wikis, but it doesn't seem like it would > be hard to merge the two approaches, with a "traditional" web-facing > wiki front-end that stores things as a POD-like syntax on the back. > > This way, you get the collaborative editing and there are already tools > out there to convert the POD source to PDF etc. >
I think Kwiki has a POD-plugin or at least used to. Just a note about POD: POD is incredibly limited. Some things that you may want to try to do with it are not possible. It is not the only generic format available, however. One option is naturally DocBook/XML, which can be translated into HTML as well as PDF, Word, LaTeX and other formats. It cannot be directly translated to plain text, but can throught an intermediate format. POD can be translated into DocBook/XML using Pod-DocBook-1.2: http://search.cpan.org/~nandu/Pod-DocBook-1.2/ Don't use the original module by Alligator Descartes which is the still the default on CPAN out of being a DeadCamel. It is old and broken and has been unmaintained for a long time. Note that the DocBook generated may not be perfectly semantically-correct due to the fact DocBook is richer than POD. Other alternatives for such markups that are somewhat text-with-brief-style-specifiers can be found in this Linux-elitists thread: http://zgp.org/pipermail/linux-elitists/2005-August/011252.html They all can be converted to HTML and some of them to DocBook too. One Wiki or another is also an option, but note that they tend to have incompatible formats, and some may not have an ability to export as DocBook. I like the MediaWiki format which is an extension of that of UseModWiki (and its Oddmuse Wiki fork, which should be better.), but I think that DokuWiki's format is also quite good. I really dislike the default Kwiki format, and despite all the flood of Kwiki plugins, no-one has written a UseModWiki/Oddmuse/MediaWiki-subset format for it yet. I keep intendening to do that, but I could not find the time yet. You can also try to use XHTML 1.1 with semantic markup of elements as a good markup. All that put aside, I should note that if you are thinking about using TeX or LaTeX, please re-consider. Tex/LaTeX are very convenient for generating PostScript or PDF but: 1. "The only thing that can understand TeX is tex". I believe it was said much earlier than when Tom Christiansen ported it to the Perl world. It is in fact much more true for TeX than it is for Perl. 2. Conversion of LaTeX to DocBook or HTML often doesn't work quite well. Often, the tools are outdated and generate old or invalid HTML, and often they break on more than complex LaTeX. TeX and LaTeX are Turing-complete, and the syntax is incredibly problematic. 3. LaTeX has poor support for hypertext, and other PDF niceties. 4. PDF and PostScript, which are the default-and-least-error-prone TeX formats, have relatively poor accessibility and internationlisation. For example, from my understanding Bi-directional text (mixed Arabic-English text, etc.) is rendered visually. 5. It is easier to convert semantic XHTML or DocBook/XML to LaTeX than the other way around. LaTeX is much less verbose than DocBook/XML, but I think you can find a less problematic format. It is is still excellent for writing texts with lots of mathematical formulae, but still a very problematic format. When working with LaTeX I often get obscure TeX errors that I can't tell immediately what exactly wrong. In DocBook/XML it just reports that one tag is missing, or that the order of tags is incorrect, which takes me much less time to solve. ------------------- Going full circle now - POD is a good option if it does what you need. The Camel Book and other perl books were written in POD. I wroted some documentation for Perl and non-Perl projects in POD. I also write all my man pages in POD because nroff scares me. But if you feel that you want something better, you have many options. Regards, Shlomi Fish P.S: DocBook/XML is problematic for using in Bi-Directional texts because of implementation problems. Otherwise, its Unicode support should be very good. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/ 95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the bottom 5%. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
