Introduction

Welcome to the world of PerlPoint. Efforts were made to make your stay as comfortable as possible. Depending on your travel experience, several things might look hard, unusual or rough at very first sight, but don't hesitate to come in and look around. You might discover new promising areas and tell your travel stories another way then.

First, make sure you have the software installed. For these first steps, the simplest way to do this is to install one of the binary packages which contain almost everything in one file - you do not even need to have perl installed. These packages are not on CPAN for reasons of size, but you find them at SourceForge as perlpoint-binary-win-<version>.zip (for Windows) and perlpoint-binary-lin-<version>.tar.bz2 (for Linux). With both packages you get a binary file perlpoint, which is the main program.

For a quick start please install PerlPoint-styles as well, we refer to it in the following.

Finally, you need a text editor and a Web browser.

PerlPoint is both a presentation and a documentation toolset. More precise, its a toolset to generate presentations and documentations. You will write a simple text and start a converter to make the final documents from this source. The final format is your choice, depending on the options passed to the converter. So you can make a presentation, speaker notes, handouts, an internet documentation and a brochure all from the same text source, but looking very individual.

Because of this two step architecture PerlPoint authors deal both with the text format and the converter, which in our case is perlpoint. The text source describes structure and contents of your document, while the converter adds layout. Let's start.