Pod::Man
Pod::Man(3) Perl Programmers Reference Guide Pod::Man(3)
NAME
Pod::Man - Convert POD data to formatted *roff input
SYNOPSIS
use Pod::Man;
my $parser = Pod::Man->new (release => $VERSION, section => 8);
# Read POD from STDIN and write to STDOUT.
$parser->parse_from_filehandle;
# Read POD from file.pod and write to file.1.
$parser->parse_from_file ('file.pod', 'file.1');
DESCRIPTION
Pod::Man is a module to convert documentation in the POD format (the
preferred language for documenting Perl) into *roff input using the man
macro set. The resulting *roff code is suitable for display on a ter-
minal using nroff(1), normally via man(1), or printing using troff(1).
It is conventionally invoked using the driver script pod2man, but it
can also be used directly.
As a derived class from Pod::Parser, Pod::Man supports the same methods
and interfaces. See Pod::Parser for all the details; briefly, one cre-
ates a new parser with "Pod::Man->new()" and then calls either
parse_from_filehandle() or parse_from_file().
new() can take options, in the form of key/value pairs that control the
behavior of the parser. See below for details.
If no options are given, Pod::Man uses the name of the input file with
any trailing ".pod", ".pm", or ".pl" stripped as the man page title, to
section 1 unless the file ended in ".pm" in which case it defaults to
section 3, to a centered title of "User Contributed Perl Documenta-
tion", to a centered footer of the Perl version it is run with, and to
a left-hand footer of the modification date of its input (or the cur-
rent date if given STDIN for input).
Pod::Man assumes that your *roff formatters have a fixed-width font
named CW. If yours is called something else (like CR), use the "fixed"
option to specify it. This generally only matters for troff output for
printing. Similarly, you can set the fonts used for bold, italic, and
bold italic fixed-width output.
Besides the obvious pod conversions, Pod::Man also takes care of for-
matting func(), func(3), and simple variable references like $foo or
@bar so you don't have to use code escapes for them; complex expres-
sions like $fred{'stuff'} will still need to be escaped, though. It
also translates dashes that aren't used as hyphens into en dashes,
makes long dashes--like this--into proper em dashes, fixes "paired
quotes," makes C++ look right, puts a little space between double
underbars, makes ALLCAPS a teeny bit smaller in troff, and escapes
stuff that *roff treats as special so that you don't have to.
The recognized options to new() are as follows. All options take a
single argument.
center
Sets the centered page header to use instead of "User Contributed
Perl Documentation".
date
Sets the left-hand footer. By default, the modification date of
the input file will be used, or the current date if stat() can't
find that file (the case if the input is from STDIN), and the date
will be formatted as YYYY-MM-DD.
fixed
The fixed-width font to use for vertabim text and code. Defaults
to CW. Some systems may want CR instead. Only matters for troff
output.
fixedbold
Bold version of the fixed-width font. Defaults to CB. Only mat-
ters for troff output.
fixeditalic
Italic version of the fixed-width font (actually, something of a
misnomer, since most fixed-width fonts only have an oblique ver-
sion, not an italic version). Defaults to CI. Only matters for
troff output.
fixedbolditalic
Bold italic (probably actually oblique) version of the fixed-width
font. Pod::Man doesn't assume you have this, and defaults to CB.
Some systems (such as Solaris) have this font available as CX.
Only matters for troff output.
name
Set the name of the manual page. Without this option, the manual
name is set to the uppercased base name of the file being converted
unless the manual section is 3, in which case the path is parsed to
see if it is a Perl module path. If it is, a path like
".../lib/Pod/Man.pm" is converted into a name like "Pod::Man".
This option, if given, overrides any automatic determination of the
name.
quotes
Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text. If the value is a
single character, it is used as both the left and right quote; if
it is two characters, the first character is used as the left quote
and the second as the right quoted; and if it is four characters,
the first two are used as the left quote and the second two as the
right quote.
This may also be set to the special value "none", in which case no
quote marks are added around C<> text (but the font is still
changed for troff output).
release
Set the centered footer. By default, this is the version of Perl
you run Pod::Man under. Note that some system an macro sets assume
that the centered footer will be a modification date and will
prepend something like "Last modified: "; if this is the case, you
may want to set "release" to the last modified date and "date" to
the version number.
section
Set the section for the ".TH" macro. The standard section number-
ing convention is to use 1 for user commands, 2 for system calls, 3
for functions, 4 for devices, 5 for file formats, 6 for games, 7
for miscellaneous information, and 8 for administrator commands.
There is a lot of variation here, however; some systems (like
Solaris) use 4 for file formats, 5 for miscellaneous information,
and 7 for devices. Still others use 1m instead of 8, or some mix
of both. About the only section numbers that are reliably consis-
tent are 1, 2, and 3.
By default, section 1 will be used unless the file ends in .pm in
which case section 3 will be selected.
The standard Pod::Parser method parse_from_filehandle() takes up to two
arguments, the first being the file handle to read POD from and the
second being the file handle to write the formatted output to. The
first defaults to STDIN if not given, and the second defaults to STD-
OUT. The method parse_from_file() is almost identical, except that its
two arguments are the input and output disk files instead. See
Pod::Parser for the specific details.
DIAGNOSTICS
roff font should be 1 or 2 chars, not "%s"
(F) You specified a *roff font (using "fixed", "fixedbold", etc.)
that wasn't either one or two characters. Pod::Man doesn't support
*roff fonts longer than two characters, although some *roff exten-
sions do (the canonical versions of nroff and troff don't either).
Invalid link %s
(W) The POD source contained a "L<>" formatting code that Pod::Man
was unable to parse. You should never see this error message; it
probably indicates a bug in Pod::Man.
Invalid quote specification "%s"
(F) The quote specification given (the quotes option to the con-
structor) was invalid. A quote specification must be one, two, or
four characters long.
%s:%d: Unknown command paragraph "%s".
(W) The POD source contained a non-standard command paragraph
(something of the form "=command args") that Pod::Man didn't know
about. It was ignored.
%s:%d: Unknown escape E<%s>
(W) The POD source contained an "E<>" escape that Pod::Man didn't
know about. "E<%s>" was printed verbatim in the output.
%s:%d: Unknown formatting code %s
(W) The POD source contained a non-standard formatting code (some-
thing of the form "X<>") that Pod::Man didn't know about. It was
ignored.
%s:%d: Unmatched =back
(W) Pod::Man encountered a "=back" command that didn't correspond
to an "=over" command.
BUGS
Eight-bit input data isn't handled at all well at present. The correct
approach would be to map E<> escapes to the appropriate UTF-8 charac-
ters and then do a translation pass on the output according to the
user-specified output character set. Unfortunately, we can't send
eight-bit data directly to the output unless the user says this is
okay, since some vendor *roff implementations can't handle eight-bit
data. If the *roff implementation can, however, that's far superior to
the current hacked characters that only work under troff.
There is currently no way to turn off the guesswork that tries to for-
mat unmarked text appropriately, and sometimes it isn't wanted (partic-
ularly when using POD to document something other than Perl).
The NAME section should be recognized specially and index entries emit-
ted for everything in that section. This would have to be deferred
until the next section, since extraneous things in NAME tends to con-
fuse various man page processors.
Pod::Man doesn't handle font names longer than two characters. Neither
do most troff implementations, but GNU troff does as an extension. It
would be nice to support as an option for those who want to use it.
The preamble added to each output file is rather verbose, and most of
it is only necessary in the presence of E<> escapes for non-ASCII char-
acters. It would ideally be nice if all of those definitions were only
output if needed, perhaps on the fly as the characters are used.
Pod::Man is excessively slow.
CAVEATS
The handling of hyphens and em dashes is somewhat fragile, and one may
get the wrong one under some circumstances. This should only matter
for troff output.
When and whether to use small caps is somewhat tricky, and Pod::Man
doesn't necessarily get it right.
SEE ALSO
Pod::Parser, perlpod(1), pod2man(1), nroff(1), troff(1), man(1), man(7)
Ossanna, Joseph F., and Brian W. Kernighan. "Troff User's Manual,"
Computing Science Technical Report No. 54, AT&T Bell Laboratories.
This is the best documentation of standard nroff and troff. At the
time of this writing, it's available at
<http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr.html>.
The man page documenting the man macro set may be man(5) instead of
man(7) on your system. Also, please see pod2man(1) for extensive docu-
mentation on writing manual pages if you've not done it before and
aren't familiar with the conventions.
The current version of this module is always available from its web
site at <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>. It is also
part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.
AUTHOR
Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>, based very heavily on the original
pod2man by Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 by Russ Allbery <rra@stan-
ford.edu>.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
perl v5.8.6 2001-09-21 Pod::Man(3)
