Add a Rakupod directive for a page break

[tbrowder]

Currently there is no way to trigger a page break for a standalone Rakudpod document.

Such a directive is not needed for general use, since long pieces can be broken up into separate files, such as our own Raku documentation exemplifies.

However, when transforming a single Rakupod file into text or PDF, such a directive is very useful, particularly for producing such products as a PDF slide deck for presentations. In such a document, each slide becomes a new page within a single file. With a suitable video projector, the presenter's slides can be shown with a laptop with any OS using almost any PDF viewer, including Adobe's Acrobat Reader.

A simple example of creating a slide deck in Rakupod:

=begin rakupod
=comment use Rakupod to configure standard =page sections

=page
=comment config for slide 1 if needed    

text and graphics for slide 1

=page
=comment config for slide 2 if needed    

text and graphics for slide 2

=end rakupod

[zag]

hi, @tbrowder , for creating a presentation, i suggest using a Named blocks (or User-defined blocks) approach. for example, you can handle your tasks using a block, for example, =Slide like this:

=begin Slide :title('test code')

text and graphics for slide 1

=end Slide

this way, you can easily manage page breaks when exporting to pdf, and you can also expand your presentation toolkit with extra features, like adding a background to your slides:

=comment config for slide 1 if needed    
=begin Slide :title('about') 
= :backimage('img/bg.jpg')

text and graphics for slide 1

=end Slide

this approach lets you bring your ideas to life using the current specification and also export to HTML, which can be useful for presentations too 😀.

you can check out a similar implementation in this module: Perl6::Pod::Slide.

of course, my suggestion doesn’t rule out the idea of having a =page or =pagebreak directive in the language!

thanks!