Re:Feedback on Installation

Hi Robert,

> I have a comment on my experience so far:

thank you for your comments. It's important for a programmer
to get feedback from people who are using the program.

> When installing Perlpoint, I fetched the tar files from CPAN
> (PerlPoint-Converters-1.01 and PerlPoint-Package-0.36 --- did I need both?)

yes, you need both ;-)

> But when I came to look at/for documentation, things started to
> go awry.  There was obviously lots of ".pp" stuff in the "doc"
> subdirectory, waiting to be converted.  But if I ran it in THERE,
> the pages would be in /tmp, right?  No good.
> 
> So what did "make install" do with the documentation?

nothing, right.

> And, perhaps more importantly, WHY ISN'T IT OBVIOUS?
> 
> The README needs to say something about this...

Ok, this is not quite explicit. In the README there is link
to ./lib/PerlPoint/Converters.pm which contains POD docu.
There is mentioned that you need to run a "make" in the doc
directory in order to create the documentation in PPDOC.

> ((Incidentally, just copying the "doc" subdirectory somewhere and
>   then doing a "make" is no good produces sets of html slides
>   that don't work because they access things (including the navigation
>   applet) relative to the directory containing the slides.))

Yes, you are right. Just copying the PPDOC dir will not work, because
all subdirectories share a common image directory and a common directory
which holds the tree applet stuff.

Normally, if you create a set of slides with pp2html, all images and
the tree applet stuff are copied to the target directory, so that the
resulting set of slides is consistent and can be moved elswhere.

But it is also possible to set it up as to share things between
different sets of slides, using the --applet_dir, --applet_ref,
--image_dir and --image_ref options.
This is what I have done for the doc dirctory.

Unfortunately I made the MISTAKE to refer to directories which are
outside of ./PPDOC. It would be ok, if the image directory and the
pp2html_styles directory were located under ./PPDOC. Then the
PPDOC directory as a whole whould be self containted and could
be moved to a different place. You could achieve this by copying or
moving the image directory and the pp2html_styles directory into the
PPDOC directory and then update the .cfg files and adapt the relative
pathnames accordingly, followed by a make in doc.

> I would strongly urge you to extend "make install" to
> build the HTML pages for the documentation and put it somewhere,
> and then to have "pp2html --help" return a very short summary 
> of its arguments and a pointer to you where the documentation was put!

Yes, this would be a good idea. Perhaps I can achieve this for the
next release. At least the PPDOC directory will be self contained
by then.



To your next Question:
----------------------
> So far, I like what I see, but there seems to be one thing
> I'd really like to do, but I can't.  Can anyone help?
> 
> I want to put a navigation bar part way down my pages.

This is not easy to accomplish at the moment. I tried some
hacking with macros and embeded perl, but did not get a
solution so far.

I will think about it because it sounds like a useful feature.
But I think I have to add it to the program.

> An alternative would be to add a command to
> insert a named (navigation) template (complete with processing).
> This would let me define macros to do the slidetop/slidebottom,
> notetop/notebottom processing, and also help others add
> other extensions...

Maybe this is the solutiont ...

Regards,
Lorenz

-- 
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Lorenz Domke, Pixel GmbH                   Email   : [email protected]
Lochhamer Schlag 17, D-82166 Muenchen      Tel/Fax : (+49 89) 89 868-224 /-111