Perl

perl is a popular computer language in which several of the DP tools are written, taking benefit of:

• its native use of handy text manipulation functions
• it's general availability on several platforms.

As soon as you've got perl installed on your computer, you can very easily use the various tools that volunteers have written for special-purpose DP-oriented tasks (for content providing, post-processing, ...).

Installing perl

Refer to the relevant chapter of the GuiGuts install manual:

windows

Installing Guiguts and Perl on Windows

Mac OS X

The basic perl is already installed, but for perl scripts with a graphical user interface or using some specific modules you need to install perl extensions.

Linux

As for Mac OS, the basic perl is installed, but you often need to install additional perl modules.

Some handy tools using perl

• Guiguts, a general purpose PPing tool
• Guiprep, a tool used to prepare the OCR text when creating projects on DP
• Gharvest, a tool to download scans from Google books.
• snatch, a batch page image download script
• and probably countless others

Links

• the Perl page on Wikipedia