Related link: http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2004/01/30/ttbook.html

In his recent story on Perl.com, Dave cross explains how he used Template Toolkit, a Perl suite used originally for creating dynamic web pages, to create The Perl Template Toolkit, mainly showing that the web is not the only reason anyone publishes anymore.

Curiously, it looks like he reinvented a lot of the tool that I like to use, LaTeX, but without the pain, suffering, and mysticism.

Like I do with The Perl Review, he uses Perl’s plain old documentation (POD) for the content, then turns that into the form that he needs. I especially like this approach because Larry Wall designed POD to branch out to different formats Indeed, perl has a lot of pod2* translators for different formats, including HTML, man page format, plain text, and the one I use, pod2latex.