podlators

Copyright 1999-2024 Russ Allbery rra@cpan.org. This software is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself. Please see the section License below for more information.

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

POD is the Plain Old Documentation format, the documentation language used for all of Perl’s documentation. I learned it to document Perl modules, started using it for Perl scripts as well, and discovered it was the most convenient way I’ve found to write program documentation. It’s extremely simple, well-designed for writing Unix manual pages (and I’m a traditionalist who thinks that any program should have a regular manual page), and easily readable in the raw format by humans.

The translators into text and nroff (for manual pages) included in the Perl distribution had various bugs, however, and used their own ad hoc parsers, so when I started running into those bugs and when a new generic parser (Pod::Parser) was written, I decided to rewrite the two translators that I use the most and fix the bugs that were bothering me. This package is the result.

podlators contains two main modules, Pod::Man and Pod::Text. The former converts POD into nroff/troff source and the latter into plain text (with various options controlling some of the formatting). There are also several subclasses of Pod::Text for generating slightly formatted text using color or other terminal control escapes, and a general utility module, Pod::ParseLink, for parsing the POD L<> formatting sequences. Also included in this package are the pod2text and pod2man driver scripts.

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.

As of Perl 5.6.0, my implementation was included in Perl core, and each release of Perl will have the at-the-time most current version of podlators included. You therefore only need to install this package yourself if you need a newer version than came with Perl (to get some bug fixes, for example).

Requirements

This module requires Perl 5.12 or later and Pod::Simple 3.26 or later. (Pod::Simple 3.26 was included in Perl 5.17.10.)

The troff/nroff generated by Pod::Man should be compatible with any troff or nroff implementation with the -man macro set, including mandoc. It is primarily tested by me under GNU groff, but Perl users send bug reports for a wide variety of implementations and Pod::Man is used to generate all of Perl’s own manual pages, so hopefully most of the bugs have been weeded out.

Building and Installation

podlators uses ExtUtils::MakeMaker and can be installed using the same process as any other ExtUtils::MakeMaker module:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make install

You’ll probably need to do the last as root unless you’re installing into a local Perl module tree in your home directory.

Testing

podlators comes with a test suite, which you can run after building with:

    make test

If a test fails, you can run a single test with verbose output via:

    prove -vb <path-to-test>

The following additional Perl modules will be used by the test suite if present:

• Test::CPAN::Changes (part of CPAN-Changes)
• Test::Kwalitee
• Test::MinimumVersion
• Test::Perl::Critic
• Test::Pod
• Test::Spelling
• Test::Strict
• Test::Synopsis

All are available on CPAN. Those tests will be skipped if the modules are not available.

To enable tests that don’t detect functionality problems but are used to sanity-check the release, set the environment variable RELEASE_TESTING to a true value. To enable tests that may be sensitive to the local environment or that produce a lot of false positives without uncovering many problems, set the environment variable AUTHOR_TESTING to a true value.

Support

The podlators web page will always have the current version of this package, the current documentation, and pointers to any additional resources.

New podlators releases are announced on the pod-people mailing list. To subscribe or see the list archives, go to the pod-people list information page.

For bug tracking, use the issue tracker on GitHub. Please be aware that I tend to be extremely busy and work projects often take priority. I’ll save your report and get to it as soon as I can, but it may take me a couple of months.

Source Repository

podlators is maintained using Git. You can access the current source on GitHub or by cloning the repository at:

https://git.eyrie.org/git/perl/podlators.git

or view the repository on the web.

The eyrie.org repository is the canonical one, maintained by the author, but using GitHub is probably more convenient for most purposes. Pull requests are gratefully reviewed and normally accepted.

License

The podlators package as a whole is covered by the following copyright statement and license:

Copyright 1999-2024 Russ Allbery rra@cpan.org

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. This means that you may choose between the two licenses that Perl is released under: the GNU GPL and the Artistic License. Please see your Perl distribution for the details and copies of the licenses.

Some files in this distribution are individually released under different licenses, all of which are compatible with the above general package license but which may require preservation of additional notices. All required notices, and detailed information about the licensing of each file, are recorded in the LICENSE file.

Files covered by a license with an assigned SPDX License Identifier include SPDX-License-Identifier tags to enable automated processing of license information. See https://spdx.org/licenses/ for more information.

For any copyright range specified by files in this package as YYYY-ZZZZ, the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.