PerlPoint::Package 0.40 and related new distributions released

Hello,

last week I released a bunch of modules which grew up in silence for a 
while.

First, there is the new PP::Package 0.40. It has a few new features, 
most of them in the API for converter authors, and a few cleanups. Among 
the changes for *users* are the new optional dot prefix for text 
paragraphs, the requirement for a headline for the very first chapter, 
and fixes in variable handling - empty variables are treated as literal 
text now according to the docs, and backslashes before variables are 
handled more correctly. Please see the changelog for a full list.

0.40  has a few API incompatibilities, but nevertheless pp2html and 
pp2latex should continue to run with them.

And, there are two new components in the package. One is an tutorial, 
incomplete yet but with many chapters already about basic and advanced 
themes.

The second new part is an extended framework, designed to simplify the 
writing of new converters. It is built on top of the existing model (so 
traditional converters continue to work and will continue to be 
supported) and has three components: generators, formatters, and 
template engines, all plugged in via module installations and invoked by 
*one* converter which comes with 0.40, named pp2tdo. The concept is 
described in the "writing converters" documents in the package, but the 
base ideas are these:

There's a four layer backend model. The first level comes with the 
framework and performes all actions on the parsers output that are 
common to all converters. The second level is a *generator*, a module 
loaded according to option -target. A generator basically produces the 
target language. But one and the same language can be formatted in 
various ways, and that's why on the next level a *formatter* is linked 
in. Formatters are modules loaded according to option -formatter. 
Finally, formatters might want to use templates. As there are several 
engines around the new framework has a general interface to template 
engines (think DBI) and can load specific "drivers" which translate the 
template requests to whatever a specific template system needs. Again, 
specific template modules are loaded dynamically by pp2tdo, according to 
options.

How does this affect a user? Well, here are a few points:

* PPP 0.40 comes with a generator and formatter for SDF which resample 
the entire functionality of pp2sdf.
* Several new distributions were released with a generator to XML 
(PP::Generator::XML), XML formatters
   to XHTML (one page and multiple pages, PP::Generator::XMML::XHTML) 
and a template driver providing
   the traditional template syntax of pp2html templates, in an extended 
version (PP::Template::Traditional).
* Styles, introduced with pp2html, are generally available now. They 
have a new design, too. Two examples
   for XHTML are provided in the new package PP::styles. Styles can 
include own generators, formatters
   and template drivers.
* If you like, you can use one converter for all target formats.

After installation of these packages, you can try the new interface, 
e.g. by a call like

  pp2tdo -target XML -format XHTML::Pages
              -doctitle Test -prefix test -suffix .html
              -targetdir slides
              -styledir .../PerlPoint-styles/demo/styles
              -style GPW7-PPGenerator-01
              -contents_header TOC test.pp

(As usual, all options can be stored in an option file.)

Again, the traditional converters will continue to be supported.

The new modules and packages still lack some tests and docs, and 
possibly a finish in the API, but a base documentation is already there 
(try -help with the call above) and are successfully used in various 
internal projects. So, I declare the new distributions beta but they can 
be considered to work well.

Greetings

             Jochen

• PerlPoint::Package 0.40 and related new distributions released by Jochen Stenzel