perl­tex – De­fine LaTeX macros in terms of Perl code

PerlTeX is a com­bi­na­tion Perl script (perl­tex.pl) and LaTeX2ε pack­age (perl­tex.sty) that, to­gether, give the user the abil­ity to de­fine LaTeX macros in terms of Perl code. Once de­fined, a Perl macro be­comes in­dis­tin­guish­able from any other LaTeX macro. PerlTeX thereby com­bines LaTeX's type­set­ting power with Perl's pro­gramma­bil­ity. PerlTeX will make use of per­sis­tent named pipes, and thereby run more ef­fi­ciently, on op­er­at­ing sys­tems that of­fer them (mostly Unix-like sys­tems).
Also pro­vided is a switch to gen­er­ate a PerlTeX-free, doc­u­ment-spe­cific, nop­erl­tex.sty that is use­ful when dis­tribut­ing a doc­u­ment to places where PerlTeX is not avail­able.