How to create beautiful PDF from Pod

Tux has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am well aware of Pod::Pdf, but that generates PDF with horrible fonts: Times and Courier are unacceptable for me. The module and has the font-metrics builtin in the module. I do not understand how Adobe could have picked these fonts as defaults.

The module has no option(s) to choose other fonts. My font of choice would be DejaVu Sans + DejaVu Sans Mono or Kuro, but any non-serif font would be a huge improvement.

What I currently do is convert pod to html with pod2html, open that in Opera and print as pdf. The result is exactly what I want, but it is hard to imagine that I cannot do this in/with perl.

Beauty is withing the eye of the reader and thus very subjective, but companies do have standards for how their docs look like and I am very happy that Times and Courier are not in our company standards.

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

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Re: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by tobyink (Canon) on Oct 26, 2012 at 13:53 UTC
I'd go with your current solution, but swap out Opera in favour of the Python xhtml2pdf library. No, you don't need to learn Python; it's bundled with a command-line script. Or instead of xhtml2pdf, wkhtmltopdf. `perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'`	[reply]
Re^2: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by Tux (Canon) on Oct 28, 2012 at 14:50 UTC
The pyhton stuff installed but failed due to missing dependency. I didn't want to pursue that. The wkhtmltopdf solution works quite well. The perl module around it sucks, as it does not offer any features beyond the program itself. I would have hoped for it to support streaming (piped input, piped output), but all it does is pass the arguments to the system command. I can do that myself. Pod::Html shows its age. Not well thought through, sadly. Even if one uses `local *STDOUT;`, there is no way to get its output caught. This module also doe not support piping/streaming. I ended up with the code below (feel free to use, alter or comment on), where I still note a few drawbacks … Page wraps are unclean. On many page breaks the top half of a line is on the end of one page, the bottom half is on the next CSS like `text-align: justify;` doesn't work very well. Read more... (3 kB) Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by daxim (Curate) on Oct 29, 2012 at 08:09 UTC
Zombie potyl's work with HTML → Webkit → Cairo → PDF is super-sweet: CPAN, Github. There's lots of example code strewn around, check every distro/repository that looks related/has the keywords in the name. As of 2012, this is the most modern and formidable solution.	[reply]
Re: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by james2vegas (Chaplain) on Oct 26, 2012 at 14:52 UTC
Look at the Pod::PseudoPod space on CPAN, or github	[reply]
Re: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by rpnoble419 (Pilgrim) on Oct 26, 2012 at 14:24 UTC
Times and Courier were picked due to the fact they are on all PC and Mac computers. PC use Arial, Macs have Helvetica, so thats out.	[reply]
Re: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by LanX (Saint) on Oct 27, 2012 at 00:31 UTC
Pod::LaTeX ? Cheers Rolf	[reply]
Re^2: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by Tux (Canon) on Oct 28, 2012 at 09:58 UTC
That doesn't look very assuring … $ podchecker /pro/bin/plp /pro/bin/plp pod syntax OK. $ pod2latex -full -out plp /pro/bin/plp Unknown sequence A</td> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Unknown sequence D</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Unknown sequence D</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Unknown sequence N</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Unknown sequence U</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Unknown sequence O</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Unknown sequence U</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Unknown sequence A</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Unknown sequence D</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. Escape sequence /a not recognised at line 2407 of file /pro/bin/plp Unknown sequence M</a> at /pro/bin/pod2latex line 218. ... and a lot more $ latex2man plp.tex plp.man latex2man: in line 37 Arguments of \subsection are not contained in a single line +. Remember: all arguments of a macro must be on the same line +. $ ls -l plp* -rw-rw-rw- 1 merijn users 0 Oct 28 10:57 plp.man -rw-rw-rw- 1 merijn users 44990 Oct 28 10:54 plp.tex $ [download] </code> Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by LanX (Saint) on Oct 28, 2012 at 12:01 UTC
well from what I can spot with my smartphone pod2latex is complaining about inlined html. IIRC the man for pod::latex is pretty explicitely saying that it cant handle html. OTOH I did a testrun yesterday combining pod2latex -full and pdflatex and it produced pdf. but if you really need to cover inlined html you will always need a html2pdf solution. Cheers Rolf	[reply]
Re^4: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by Tux (Canon) on Oct 28, 2012 at 13:29 UTC
Re: How to create beautiful PDF from Pod by Anonymous Monk on Oct 26, 2012 at 13:47 UTC
It might be best to make a patch or a Pod::Pdf::Fonts that takes the font as a parameter, for everyone to enjoy.	[reply]

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