LaTeX::Pod - Transform LaTeX source files to POD (Plain old documentation)

 use LaTeX::Pod;

 $parser = LaTeX::Pod->new('/path/to/source');
 print $parser->convert;

LaTeX::Pod converts LaTeX sources to Perl's POD (Plain old documentation) format. Currently only a subset of the available LaTeX language is supported; see below for further information.

The constructor requires that the path to the LaTeX source must be defined:

 $parser = LaTeX::Pod->new('/path/to/source');

Returns the parser object.

There is only one public method available, namely convert():

 $parser->convert;

Returns the computed POD document as string.

Currently supported:

* chapters

* sections/subsections/subsub...

* verbatim blocks

* itemized lists

* plain text

* bold/italic/code font tags

* umlauts

The current implementation is a bit flaky because LaTeX::TOM, the framework being used for parsing the LaTeX nodes, makes a clear distinction between various types of nodes. As example, an \item directive has quite often a separate text associated with it as its content. Such directives and their expected converted relatives within the output stream possibly cannot be easily detected without some kind of sophisticated "look-behind" mechanism, which is how LaTeX::Pod internally functions.

LaTeX::Pod was designed with the intention to be context-sensitive aware. This is being achieved by setting which node has been seen before the current one in order to be able to call the appropriate routine for a LaTeX directive with two or more nodes. Furthermore, LaTeX::Pod registers which node it has previously encountered and unregisters this information when it made use of it.

Considering that the POD documentation format has a limited subset of directives, the overhead of keeping track of node occurences appears to be bearable. The POD computed may consist of too many newlines before undergoing a transformation where leading and trailing newlines will be truncated.

LaTeX::TOM

Steven Schubiger <schubiger@cpan.org>

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/