Re: Creating Books and Manuals with Perl

[Aristotle]

I think POD is an excellent choice for the task. It was perfectly sufficient for Camel 3 to be written in it, after all; a perfect flyweight markup language for documentation or technical literature. You can embed sequences of foreign markup with the =for directive; for example have a =for html passage that contains a link to an image. There are many, often highly configurable pod2* scripts. Want to have it in actual print? pod2latex will do the job. No need to even mention pod2html. If none of those suit your needs you can roll your own f.ex by throwing POD::Parser and Template Toolkit 2 at the problem for minimum effort and maximum flexibility.

What I love about POD is that it is very basic yet provides all the essential directives: the resulting documents are fully indexable. Formatting directives are reduced to the minimum required, so they translate well to any destination media regardless of what it is.

I would definitely not want to write documentation in XML. That markup language is, IMO, not for human consumption.

POD is underappreciated in my opinion. Quoth podmaster's sig: POD is sexy. ;^)

Makeshifts last the longest.