Is there a WYSIWYG Perl Pod editor?

Question

Is there an easy to use "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" editor for Pod available?

I'm not that used to the Pod syntax yet so having the option of writing the Pod and immediatly see what the output would look like will help a lot. Ideally this editor would have some kind of "code-completion" to help with the correct syntax.

Is there an editor like this?

Answer 1

No, at least not that I've ever heard whisper of. Pod is a very simple form of markup; it shouldn't take long to learn it.

That said, any decent text editor should be configurable to recognize Pod directives and apply syntax highlighting to them. If your editor does code-completion of keywords you'd get that too. (Note: code-completion wouldn't apply to a hypothetical WYSIWYG editor.)

As for seeing the output, there's no standard way of rendering Pod. It can be rendered as plain text, HTML, or anything else for which someone was written a translator. Depending on your text editor you could add a "user command" to translate the current document and show it in an appropriate viewer. For example, run it through pod2html and open the resulting page in Firefox.

Edit: The Hints for Writing Pod section of perlpod says

If you're more familiar with writing in HTML than with writing in Pod, you can try your hand at writing documentation in simple HTML, and converting it to Pod with the experimental Pod::HTML2Pod module

which would allow you to use a WYSIWYG HTML editor to write documentation. (At least in principle; much would depend on what kind of output the editor produced.)

Answer 2

POD Web View allows you to upload a POD file, get it from a URL, or paste its contents and edit it on the fly. The generated HTML can be displayed in the style of your choice, mimicking how it would look on CPAN, MetaCPAN, or GitHub.

To give credit where it's due, the backend is built on Dancer and uses Pod::Simple::HTML to generate the HTML preview. The user interface is made with Twitter Bootstrap, a lot of JavaScript/jQuery code, and Ace editor.

up on Github

perlpodpod-editor

Answer 3

There is unfinished App::Wx::PodEditor on CPAN.