Ubuntu Manpage: Pod::Man - Convert POD data to formatted *roff input

Provided by: perl-doc_5.34.0-3ubuntu1.4_all

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_file (\*STDIN);

           # 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::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 underscores, 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 for the ".TH" macro. The default, if this option is not specified, is
"User Contributed Perl Documentation".

date
Sets the left-hand footer for the ".TH" macro. If this option is not set, the contents of the
environment variable POD_MAN_DATE, if set, will be used. Failing that, the value of
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, the modification date of the input file, or the current time if stat() can't find
that file (which will be the case if the input is from "STDIN") will be used. If obtained from the
file modification date or the current time, the date will be formatted as "YYYY-MM-DD" and will be
based on UTC (so that the output will be reproducible regardless of local time zone).

errors
How to report errors. "die" says to throw an exception on any POD formatting error. "stderr" says
to report errors on standard error, but not to throw an exception. "pod" says to include a POD
ERRORS section in the resulting documentation summarizing the errors. "none" ignores POD errors
entirely, as much as possible.

The default is "pod".

fixed
The fixed-width font to use for verbatim 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.

lquote
rquote
Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text. "lquote" sets the left quote mark and "rquote" sets
the right quote mark. Either may also be set to the special value "none", in which case no quote
mark is added on that side of C<> text (but the font is still changed for troff output).

Also see the "quotes" option, which can be used to set both quotes at once. If both "quotes" and one
of the other options is set, "lquote" or "rquote" overrides "quotes".

name
Set the name of the manual page for the ".TH" macro. 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.

If generating a manual page from standard input, the name will be set to "STDIN" if this option is
not provided. Providing this option is strongly recommended to set a meaningful manual page name.

nourls
Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text are formatted to show both the anchor text
and the URL. In other words:

L<foo|http://example.com/>

is formatted as:

foo <http://example.com/>

This option, if set to a true value, suppresses the URL when anchor text is given, so this example
would be formatted as just "foo". This can produce less cluttered output in cases where the URLs are
not particularly important.

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. Otherwise, it is split in half, and the first half of the string is
used as the left quote and the second is used 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).

Also see the "lquote" and "rquote" options, which can be used to set the left and right quotes
independently. If both "quotes" and one of the other options is set, "lquote" or "rquote" overrides
"quotes".

release
Set the centered footer for the ".TH" macro. By default, this is set to the version of Perl you run
Pod::Man under. Setting this to the empty string will cause some *roff implementations to use the
system default value.

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 for your target system, 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
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.

stderr
Send error messages about invalid POD to standard error instead of appending a POD ERRORS section to
the generated *roff output. This is equivalent to setting "errors" to "stderr" if "errors" is not
already set. It is supported for backward compatibility.

utf8
By default, Pod::Man produces the most conservative possible *roff output to try to ensure that it
will work with as many different *roff implementations as possible. Many *roff implementations
cannot handle non-ASCII characters, so this means all non-ASCII characters are converted either to a
*roff escape sequence that tries to create a properly accented character (at least for troff output)
or to "X".

If this option is set, Pod::Man will instead output UTF-8. If your *roff implementation can handle
it, this is the best output format to use and avoids corruption of documents containing non-ASCII
characters. However, be warned that *roff source with literal UTF-8 characters is not supported by
many implementations and may even result in segfaults and other bad behavior.

Be aware that, when using this option, the input encoding of your POD source should be properly
declared unless it's US-ASCII. Pod::Simple will attempt to guess the encoding and may be successful
if it's Latin-1 or UTF-8, but it will produce warnings. Use the "=encoding" command to declare the
encoding. See perlpod(1) for more information.

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_fh() 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. As with parse_file(), parse_lines() and parse_string_document() default to sending
their output to "STDOUT" unless changed with the output_fh() method. Be aware that parse_lines() and
parse_string_document() both expect raw bytes, not decoded characters.

To put the output from any parse method into a string instead of a file handle, call the output_string()
method instead of output_fh().

See Pod::Simple for more specific details on the methods available to all derived parsers.

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 errors setting "%s"
           (F) The "errors" parameter to the constructor was set to an unknown value.

       Invalid quote specification "%s"
           (F)  The  quote  specification  given  (the "quotes" option to the constructor) was invalid.  A quote
           specification must be either one character long or an even number (greater than one) characters long.

       POD document had syntax errors
           (F) The POD document being formatted had syntax errors and the "errors" option was set to "die".

ENVIRONMENT

PERL_CORE
If set and Encode is not available, silently fall back to non-UTF-8 mode without complaining to
standard error. This environment variable is set during Perl core builds, which build Encode after
podlators. Encode is expected to not (yet) be available in that case.

POD_MAN_DATE
If set, this will be used as the value of the left-hand footer unless the "date" option is explicitly
set, overriding the timestamp of the input file or the current time. This is primarily useful to
ensure reproducible builds of the same output file given the same source and Pod::Man version, even
when file timestamps may not be consistent.

SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
If set, and POD_MAN_DATE and the "date" options are not set, this will be used as the modification
time of the source file, overriding the timestamp of the input file or the current time. It should
be set to the desired time in seconds since UNIX epoch. This is primarily useful to ensure
reproducible builds of the same output file given the same source and Pod::Man version, even when
file timestamps may not be consistent. See
<https://reproducible-builds.org/specs/source-date-epoch/> for the full specification.

(Arguably, according to the specification, this variable should be used only if the timestamp of the
input file is not available and Pod::Man uses the current time. However, for reproducible builds in
Debian, results were more reliable if this variable overrode the timestamp of the input file.)

BUGS

       Encoding  handling  assumes  that PerlIO is available and does not work properly if it isn't.  The "utf8"
       option is therefore not supported unless Perl is built with PerlIO support.

       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 toward 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.

       Pod::Man is excessively slow.

CAVEATS

       If Pod::Man is given the "utf8" option, the encoding of its output file handle will be forced to UTF-8 if
       possible, overriding any existing encoding.  This will be done even if the file handle is not created  by
       Pod::Man and was passed in from outside.  This maintains consistency regardless of PERL_UNICODE and other
       settings.

       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.

       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.

AUTHOR

       Russ   Allbery   <rra@cpan.org>,  based  very  heavily  on  the  original  pod2man  by  Tom  Christiansen
       <tchrist@mox.perl.com>.   The  modifications  to  work  with  Pod::Simple  instead  of  Pod::Parser  were
       originally contributed by Sean Burke <sburke@cpan.org> (but I've since hacked them beyond recognition and
       all bugs are mine).

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       Copyright 1999-2010, 2012-2019 Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>

       Substantial contributions by Sean Burke <sburke@cpan.org>.

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