Introduction

OK, there's this special cool multiplatform presenter software you want to use, but currently PerlPoint cannot be translated into its format. This situation can be changed - just write a PerlPoint converter. A PerlPoint converter takes a PerlPoint source and translates it into another format.

The target format can be almost everything. There's no restriction to formats used by presentation software. Documents can be presented in many ways: on a wall, on screen, or printed, in the Web or intranet - and there are many formats out there meeting many special needs. Think of the PerlPoint converters already there: they address HTML (for browser presentations, online documentations, training materials, ...), PPresenter (for traditional presentations), LaTex (for high quality prints) as well as XML and SDF (as intermediate formats to generate PDF, PostScript, POD, text and more easily). Once you know the target format, you can write a PerlPoint converter to it.

There are two ways to write a converter using the PerlPoint framework. First, the traditional way, which is stream oriented and deals with stream events. In this model, there's a converter program for each target format.

The second model is more abstract. Based on the experience with traditional converters, it hides much more of the internals, provides more base features and allows to deal with structural entities like paragraphs, tables etc. There is one converter for all formats, configured by modules which are loaded automatically, depending on the format. The modules are organized in an inheritance chain, allowing to write new converters on base of existing ones. This is the formatter model.

If you are new to PerlPoint converters, I strongly recommend to use the formatter approach. The traditional approach is still working (in fact the formatter model is based on it), but it is harder to deal with.