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 terminal 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 creates a new parser with
"Pod::Man->new()" and then calls either parse_from_file_ handle() 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 Documen
tation", 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 fixedwidth 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.

center: Sets the centered page header to use instead of "User
Contributed Perl Documentation".
date: Sets the left-hand footer. By default, the modifica
tion date of the input file will be used, or the cur
rent date if stat() can't find that file (the case if
the input is from STDIN), and the date will be format
ted 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 matters 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 version, 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 sec
ond as the right quoted; and if it is four characters,
the first two are used as the left quote and the sec
ond 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 ver
sion 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 numbering convention is to use 1 for user com
mands, 2 for system calls, 3 for functions, 4 for
devices, 5 for file formats, 6 for games, 7 for mis
cellaneous information, and 8 for administrator com
mands. 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 con
sistent 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 STDOUT.
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", "fixed
bold", etc.) that wasn't either one or two characters.
Pod::Man doesn't support *roff fonts longer than two
characters, although some *roff extensions 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 constructor) was invalid. A quote specifica
tion 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 ver
batim in the output.
%s:%d: Unknown formatting code %s: (W) The POD source contained a non-standard formatting
code (something 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 characters 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 format unmarked text appropriately, and sometimes
it isn't wanted (particularly when using POD to document
something other than Perl).

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.

Pod::Man doesn't handle font names longer than two charac
ters. 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 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.

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.

AUTHOR

Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>, based very heavily on the
original pod2man by Tom Christiansen
<tchrist@mox.perl.com>.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This program is free software; you may redistribute it
and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

docs.sk

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See also