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I have always been unhappy reading source code on the Internet and on
slides.  The colors are never quite right.  It seems like every Perl
to HTML converter in existence gets it wrong (my blog is no
exception).

This bothered me so much that for my last Perl talk, I gave up on the
Perl-based slide tools and wrote my slide-generation software in the
environment that always highlights things correctly -- emacs.  (The
result of this is eslide, available from my git repository.  It is
quite nice; it is sort of a hybrid between tools like Spork and
Keynote, and I will be polishing it further as the conference season
begins.  Check it out and email me or post a comment if you have
questions.)

Anyway, using emacs for your presentations is nice, but it is hard for
people to download the slides after the talk.  So part 2 of eslide is
a Perl program that converts the slides to HTML and PDF.  The hardest
part of this is the syntax highlighting, of course, but I finally
figured out how to convert arbitrary data in Perl strings to
HTML-formatted text with emacs :) The result is C<Text::EmacsColor> on
CPAN.

You use it like this:

      lang:Perl
      # eww, the colors are wrong here ;)
      use Text::EmacsColor;

      my $colorer = Text::EmacsColor->new;

      my $html = $colorer->format(
        'my $foo = 42', # code
        'cperl',        # the emacs mode to use (cperl, lisp, haskell, ...)
      );


C<$html> is the HTML and CSS representing the colored string.  In the
next version, I will parse everything out into a DOM and a CSS::Tiny
document, but I wanted to get the proof of concept out onto CPAN for
the Testers to have their way with.  It currently works with both
emacs 22 and emacs 23, and you can either fork off a new emacs process
for each string (not as slow as it sounds), or you can talk to a
persistent process via emacsclient (really really fast)... so please
try it out.  It is a pleasant alternative to C<Text::VimColor> for
those of us that spend most of our time in emacs.

At some point, I will be replacing the syntax-coloring in Angerwhale
with this.  The result will be so beautiful that just thinking about
it brings a tear to my eye ;)  (I am working on Angerwhale again, BTW.
I fixed the annoying broken captchas last night, so leaving a comment
on this article should be much easier.  Yay!)

It is late, so I will let you know more about all this later.  G'nite.
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