All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Reinventing the wheel

ewaters on 2004-12-20T04:40:44

I fear I keep trying to reinvent the wheel. Every time I sit down to write perl code, I need to get in the habit of searching CPAN -- throughly. I've been working on a PDF generator, and at first didn't find anything on CPAN. Then, I looked again, and found PDF::FromHTML. Now, there's plenty of things that FromHTML doesn't do (such as support for CSS) which is integral to what I'm working on... but still, I do wonder if it'd be better for me to work within other people's frameworks rather then trying to do it differently just because my needs happen to be slightly different.

Or, is it possible that we need lots of different, similar tools that do slightly different things for slightly different purposes?

htmldoc

Purdy on 2004-12-20T14:38:48

I didn't know about that module, but when I needed such a thing (convert html to pdf), I ended up using htmldoc. I'm not sure if it supports all that you need (it says it does not support stylesheets) - I just had simple requirements, but it works great for me.

IMHO, I would always try to work within a framework instead of re-inventing the wheel. Perl module authors are notorious for being open to suggestions and patches. :)