You might talk to chromatic about POD book creation, or look at his repo for Modern Perl, which is written in POD with POD::Weaver at https://github.com/chromatic/modern_perl_book
Joel On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 8:21 AM, Matthew Kenworthy <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Chris, Karl, and other PDL Book interested people: > > On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Chris Marshall <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Hi Matt- >> >> How are things going with the PDL book "project" >> as far as status, plans, working files, or other >> information? Would setting up a git folder at >> sf.net help with coordination and contributions? > > A git folder would be a good idea :) > > Here were my thoughts on PDL Books and Tutorials - > > In order to write and edit PDL documentation, it would be good to have > a simple format that everyone could edit easily and see it updated in > a timely fashion, but that it could be exported to something nicer as > a printable format in a PDF, such as the LaTeX output of the original > PDL Book. > > To this end, I decided to try rewriting the PDL Book in POD. > > I've found out that this works surprisingly well, because: > > 1) Writing in POD means that it is completely available and searchable > in the PDL help system > > 2) There's no maintaining a separate documentation repository (it > lives with PDL) > > 3) It can be cross-linked in with the PDL core documentation > > To test this out, I converted the PDL Book Chapter 3, which is image > intensive chapters in the book, in order to see what the output would > be like in HTML and PDF. > > The original POD documentation: > > http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~kenworthy/pdlpod/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT.pod > > Converted to HTML: > > http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~kenworthy/pdlpod/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT.html > > ....and exported as PDF: > > http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~kenworthy/pdlpod/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT/test.pdf > > So, what does this mean? > > Ideally, it would be good to see a PDL Book, a set of PDL Tutorials > and a PDL Reference (mostly made up of the PDL function documentation) > which factor in the hard work done on the earlier separate texts, so > that we can all point new users to a given help page from within PDL. > > The main work is doing the control code mangling, the conversion of > the images to PNG and checking that the new texts scan well. I can > take the lead on organisation, but I don't have that much time to do > conversions all by myself - if two or three people are willing to work > on converting a chapter at a time, we could pull something together > for a December/January release. > > Okay, have a look at the PDF if nothing else, and let me know what you think. > > Cheers, > > Matt > > > -- > Matthew Kenworthy / Assistant Professor / Leiden Observatory > Niels Bohrweg 2 (#463) / P.O. Box 9513 / 2300 RA Leiden / NL > > _______________________________________________ > 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
