[Chicago-talk] Looking for good Perl .hlp/.chm docs.

[Andrew Rodland]

On Thursday 03 August 2006 5:20 pm, Andrew Bedno wrote:
> Long time reader, first time writer... Having searched the www over,
> thought it worth asking this group...
>
> I like my programming language manuals in help file format as that provides
> good searchability.  PHP's .chm for example is extraordinary and even
> includes user contributed notes and examples.
>
> But the only Perl docs I've found (ActiveState for example) are html, so
> I've got no arbitrary searching, nor even much cross referencing.  I've
> found a few help files versions but they're simple conversions from the
> html.
>
> So, anyone got a lead on a good .HLP or .CHM version of Perl docs?
>
Who says HTML isn't easily searchable? HTML is practically the most searchable 
thing out there. And CHM is nothing more than HTML with some compression and 
preprocessing -- as I understand it, PHP's CHM manual is produced directly 
from the HTML of the Annotated Manual.

Also, Perl's native documentation format isn't HTML; it's POD, which is 
expected to be displayed (mostly) by the 'perldoc' tool. Unfortunately, 
windows systems are in general too terminal-incompetent to run perldoc 
properly, which is why ActiveState employs a POD->HTML converter to prerender 
all of the docs for its packages.  If you like, I see no reason why you 
couldn't take all of that HTML and produce a CHM file using free tools -- and 
then MS HTML Help will do the indexing and searching.

Andrew