podlators version 4.01 (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, 2014, 2015 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 Perl 5.6.0 or later and Module::Build are required to build this module. 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 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. BUILDING AND INSTALLATION Installation of this package will shadow the Pod::Man, Pod::Text, and subclasses that come with Perl. The ones from Perl will not be overwritten, but the ones installed by this package will generally take precendent. This may result in different behavior than using the versions in Perl. It will probably also shadow the perlpodstyle man page. Normally, the pod2man and pod2text scripts installed by this package will go into a directory like /usr/local/bin. Be sure that this directory is earlier in your PATH than the directory containing the modules installed by Perl itself (often /usr/bin). Otherwise, you will call the new modules with the old driver scripts, which may cause various problems. Follow the standard installation procedure for Perl modules using ExtUtils::MakeMaker, which is to type the following commands: perl Makefile.PL make make test make install You'll probably need to do the last step as root. This will also install driver scripts named pod2text and pod2man and the perlpodstyle man page. 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@cpan.org.