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Pod::Man(3pm) Perl Programmers Reference Guide Pod::Man(3pm)
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 lan-
guage for documenting Perl) into *roff input using the man macro set. The result-
ing *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 inter-
faces. See Pod::Parser for all the details; briefly, one creates 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 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 argu-
ment.
center
Sets the centered page header to use instead of "User Contributed Perl Documen-
tation".
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 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 ver-
sion). 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 sec-
tion 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 char-
acter, 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 modi-
fied: "; if this is the case, you may want to set "release" to the last modi-
fied 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 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 consistent 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 han-
dle 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 identi-
cal, 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 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 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 (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 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 characters. It would ide-
ally 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 neces-
sarily 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 Sci-
ence Technical Report No. 54, AT&T Bell Laboratories. This is the best documenta-
tion 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.
AUTHOR
Russ Allbery <rra AT stanford.edu>, based very heavily on the original pod2man by Tom
Christiansen <tchrist AT mox.com>.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 by Russ Allbery <rra AT stanford.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(3pm)
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On Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) PHP/5.2.5 mod_perl/1.30 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a
Under GNU General Public License
2008-12-02 03:55 @38.103.63.58 CrawledBy CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)