Pod::Man(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation 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_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.
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 AT cpan.org>, based very heavily on the original pod2man
by Tom Christiansen <tchrist AT mox.com>. The modifications to work
with Pod::Simple instead of Pod::Parser were originally contributed by
Sean Burke <sburke AT cpan.org> (but I've since hacked them beyond
recognition and all bugs are mine).
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright 1999-2010, 2012-2018 Russ Allbery <rra AT cpan.org>
Substantial contributions by Sean Burke <sburke AT cpan.org>.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
SEE ALSO
Pod::Simple, perlpod(1), pod2man(1), nroff(1), troff(1), man(1), man(7)
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.troff.org/54.pdf>;.
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 <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>;. It is also
part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.
perl v5.26.3 2018-05-07 Pod::Man(3)
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