«WriteAt»: my opensource startup on Perl 6 Pod
The «WriteAt» is a free and opensource suite for book writers. It helps making and preparing books for publishing and printing. «WriteAt» uses pod6 as markup language.
"Compared to POD, Perl 6's Pod is much more uniform, somewhat more compact, and considerably more expressive." (S26)
The typical «WriteAt» book template looks like this:
=TITLE MyBook
=SUBTITLE My first free book
=AUTHOR Alex Green
=DESCRIPTION Short description of the book
=begin CHANGES
Aug 18th 2010(v0.2)[zag] preface
May 27th 2010(v0.1)[zag] Initial version
=end CHANGES
=CHAPTER Intro
D<Pod> is an easy-to-use markup language with a simple, consistent
object model underlying the document. Pod can be used for writing language
documentation, documenting programs and modules, as well as for
other types of document composition.
As you see it is simple. Because pod6 is extensible, it is possible to split big files into parts:
=Include src/preface.pod6
=Include src/basics.pod6
or insert images:
=Image berries.png
A real book sample, a free book "Everything about Perl 6", can be downloaded from https://github.com/zag/ru-perl6-book.
The current version of «WriteAt» is 0.02. It supports exporting pod6 books to HTML. «WriteAt» is located at https://github.com/zag/writeat and the CPAN distribution is available from here: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?WriteAt, also available at launchpad.net : https://launchpad.net/~zahatski/+archive/ppa.
How to install «WriteAt» ?
Under Ubuntu:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zahatski/ppa
sudo apt-get install writeat
Make book
git clone https://github.com/zag/writeat-tmpl-firstbook.git
cd writeat-tmpl-firstbook
make
Reports of bugs, including inaccuracies in the documentation are always welcome.