What is PerlPoint?

When it comes to documentation, there are two base approaches: the WYSIWYG concept that allows to compose things an interactive way, and the description language concept which "describes" documents in a special format, which finally is transformed into the visual result. Think of office applications as examples for the first approach, and HTML, XML or LaTeX for the second one.

For one or the other reason, people prefer one or the other approach. It depends on their needs (and preferences) which solution suits them most.

PerlPoint is a "descriptive" toolset. To build a document, it is described in a text file in the PerlPoint format. As with all descriptive approaches, using a text format makes those sources very portable.

But PerlPoint is portable in a second way, too: as it is written in pure Perl, the toolset runs on a wide range of platforms. Whereever Perl runs, PerlPoint runs as well.

So well, but what will this toolset produce? Will the results be portable, too? - This depends on what you produce, because there is no special PerlPoint output. Instead, PerlPoint can produce various formats. So it is flexible as well. Produce HTML if you want to publish via Web or make presentations. Produce PDF if you want to make brochures or handouts or presentations in this format, or if you are in need for a document that cannot be modified. Produce LaTeX if you want to print in superb quality, or to integrate your docs in some sort of LaTeX postprocessing. Or choose SDF as your intermediate format, to go for POD, PostScript or manpages. Or join the XML community. All these target formats are at hand right now. And if none of them suits your needs, you can write new generator backends.

Besides portability and flexibility, PerlPoint is easy to start with. Basically, docs are very much like simple text documents, divided into paragraphs. We will see this in a minute. Nobody needs to be a programming expert to begin, people can start quickly. On the other hand, if you are in need of more sophisticated solutions, PerlPoint will support you as well and offer tags, macros, embedded programming, filters, conditions and more.