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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)