use Pod::Man;
my $parser = Pod::Man->new (release => $VERSION, section => 8);
# Read POD from STDIN and write to STDOUT.
$parser->parse_file (\*STDIN);
# Read POD from file.pod and write to file.1.
$parser->parse_from_file ('file.pod', 'file.1');
As a derived class from Pod::Simple, Pod::Man supports the same methods and interfaces. See Pod::Simple for all the details.
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 Documentation'', 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 current 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 formatting func(), func(3), and simple variable references like $foo or @bar so you don't have to use code escapes for them; complex expressions 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.
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).
By default, section 1 will be used unless the file ends in .pm in which case section 3 will be selected.
The standard Pod::Simple method parse_file() takes one argument naming the POD file to read from. By default, the output is sent to STDOUT, but this can be changed with the output_fd() method.
The standard Pod::Simple method parse_from_file() takes up to two arguments, the first being the input file to read POD from and the second being the file to write the formatted output to.
You can also call parse_lines() to parse an array of lines or parse_string_document() to parse a document already in memory. To put the output into a string instead of a file handle, call the output_string() method. See Pod::Simple for the specific details.
There is currently no way to turn off the guesswork that tries to format unmarked text appropriately, and sometimes it isn't wanted (particularly when using POD to document something other than Perl). Most of the work towards fixing this has now been done, however, and all that's still needed is a user interface.
The NAME section should be recognized specially and index entries emitted for everything in that section. This would have to be deferred until the next section, since extraneous things in NAME tends to confuse various man page processors. Currently, no index entries are emitted for anything in NAME.
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 non-ASCII characters. It would ideally be nice if all of those definitions were only output if needed, perhaps on the fly as the characters are used.
When and whether to use small caps is somewhat tricky, and Pod::Man doesn't necessarily get it right.
Converting neutral double quotes to properly matched double quotes doesn't work unless there are no formatting codes between the quote marks. This only matters for troff output.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
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 documentation 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.