Re: Creating Books and Manuals with Perl

[cxbast]

You may want to check out TeX and LaTeX which are open source standards for writing scientific and other types of manuals including Readers Digest. TeX gives you the flexibility of putting anything you want on a page without the difficulty of coding it in PostScript. Another nice feature is that it is a language that can be data driven so there are no point and clicks required to keep your manual up to date. We use it to generate PostScript and PDF reports with graphics etc... We have produced 5000-page reports, so volume it can handle.

I recommend A Gentle Introduction to TeX (PDF). If you read this document you will be able to get an idea if TeX is what you are looking for. If it is then look around in ctan.org for how to get started.

[weini]

I agree that LaTeX is a great choice for this task.

You might even look at a Literate-Programming (LP) tool such as noweb to mix your source code and documentation. In my opinion this makes updating both, the code and the docu, a lot easier.
You'll find interesting things on LP on this site and the homepage of noweb.

Enjoy writing!
weini