podlators version 2.5.3 (Format POD source into various output formats) Maintained by Russ Allbery Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 Russ Allbery . This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. I welcome all bug reports and patches for this package (and in particular, if you're looking for a project, see TODO). However, please be aware that I tend to be extremely busy and to get a lot of mail. I'll save your mail and get to it as soon as I can, but depending on how busy I am it may take me a couple of months. BLURB podlators contains Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules which convert POD input to *roff source output, suitable for man pages, or plain text. It also includes several subclasses of Pod::Text for formatted output to terminals with various capabilities. It is the source package for the Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules included with Perl. DESCRIPTION This package contains the replacement for pod2text and Pod::Text in versions of Perl 5.005 and earlier. It also contains Pod::Man and pod2man, the replacement for pod2man found in Perl distributions prior to 5.6.0. The modules contained in it use Pod::Simple rather than doing the POD parsing themselves, and are designed to be object-oriented and to subclass. As an example, three useful subclasses of Pod::Text are also included: Pod::Text::Color, which uses ANSI color escape sequences to highlight text, Pod::Text::Termcap, which determines the correct control sequences to embolden and underline text from terminal termcap information, and Pod::Text::Overstrike, which uses the backspacing method of underlining and bold also used by the output of nroff. Both Pod::Text and Pod::Man provide a variety of options for fine-tuning their output. Pod::Man also tries to massage input text where appropriate to produce better output when run through nroff or troff, such as distinguishing between different types of hyphens and using slightly smaller case for acronyms. A general parser utility module for L<> formatting code parsing is also included, Pod::ParseLink. This implements only the simple parse described in perlpodspec. It is no longer used by the modules here (Pod::Simple has a separate implementation of the same concept), but is included in case others find it useful. REQUIREMENTS Both Pod::Man and Pod::Text are built on Pod::Simple, which handles the basic POD parsing and character set conversion. Pod::Simple 3.06 or later is required (and Pod::Simple 3.07 is recommended). It is available from CPAN and part of Perl core as of 5.10.0. Encode is also required (included in Perl core since 5.8.0). To use Pod::Text::Color, Term::ANSIColor is required. It is available from CPAN and part of Perl core as of 5.6.0. PerlIO support is required for Pod::Text to set the output encoding to match the input encoding (which it does unless the utf8 option is used). Without this, the output will use Perl's internal encoding, which may be surprising and may produce Perl warnings. To run the test suite, Test::More is required. It is available from CPAN and part of Perl core as of 5.6.2. The test suite includes a formatting and spelling check of all of the POD documentation. To check formatting, Test::Pod is required. To check spelling, Pod::Spell and either aspell or ispell with the american dictionary are also required. The user's path is searched for aspell or ispell and aspell is preferred. Spelling tests are disabled by default since spelling dictionaries differ too much between systems. To enable those tests, set RRA_MAINTAINER_TESTS to a true value. INSTALLATION WARNING: Installation of this package will replace the pod2text and pod2man scripts that come with Perl, and for Perl 5.6.0 or later the versions of Pod::Text and Pod::Man installed with Perl. Make sure that you have a version of this package as new as or newer than the modules that come with Perl. For older versions of Perl, pod2text and pod2man will still be overwritten, but Pod::Text will not be, making many of the options in pod2text not actually useable unless you overwrite the version that comes with Perl with it (since Perl looks in its own directories before it looks in site_perl). Note also that the version in this package attempts to be backwards-compatible but is not bug compatible, and some things like the default wrap margin have changed. The version contained in this package is the default version for Perl 5.5.560 or thereabouts and higher, but may be slightly newer depending on how updates have been synchronized. Follow the standard installation procedure for Perl modules, which is to type the following commands: perl Makefile.PL make make install You'll probably need to do the "make install" as root. This will also install driver scripts named pod2text and pod2man; see their man pages for more information. HOMEPAGE AND SOURCE REPOSITORY The podlators web page at: http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/ will always have the current version of this package, the current documentation, and pointers to any additional resources. podlators is maintained using Git. You can access the current source by cloning the repository at: git://git.eyrie.org/perl/podlators.git or view the repository on the web at: http://git.eyrie.org/?p=perl/podlators.git You can file bug reports for this package in RT at: https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=podlators or send me mail directly at rra@stanford.edu.