1Pod::Man(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Pod::Man(3)
2
6 Pod::Man - Convert POD data to formatted *roff input
7
9 use Pod::Man;
10 my $parser = Pod::Man->new (release => $VERSION, section => 8);
11 # Read POD from STDIN and write to STDOUT.
13 $parser->parse_file (\*STDIN);
14 # Read POD from file.pod and write to file.1.
16 $parser->parse_from_file ('file.pod', 'file.1');
17
19 Pod::Man is a module to convert documentation in the POD format (the
20 preferred language for documenting Perl) into *roff input using the man
21 macro set. The resulting *roff code is suitable for display on a
22 terminal using nroff(1), normally via man(1), or printing using
23 troff(1). It is conventionally invoked using the driver script
24 pod2man, but it can also be used directly.
25 As a derived class from Pod::Simple, Pod::Man supports the same methods
27 and interfaces. See Pod::Simple for all the details.
28 new() can take options, in the form of key/value pairs that control the
30 behavior of the parser. See below for details.
31 If no options are given, Pod::Man uses the name of the input file with
33 any trailing ".pod", ".pm", or ".pl" stripped as the man page title, to
34 section 1 unless the file ended in ".pm" in which case it defaults to
35 section 3, to a centered title of "User Contributed Perl
36 Documentation", to a centered footer of the Perl version it is run
37 with, and to a left-hand footer of the modification date of its input
38 (or the current date if given "STDIN" for input).
39 Pod::Man assumes that your *roff formatters have a fixed-width font
41 named "CW". If yours is called something else (like "CR"), use the
42 "fixed" option to specify it. This generally only matters for troff
43 output for printing. Similarly, you can set the fonts used for bold,
44 italic, and bold italic fixed-width output.
45 Besides the obvious pod conversions, Pod::Man also takes care of
47 formatting func(), func(3), and simple variable references like $foo or
48 @bar so you don't have to use code escapes for them; complex
49 expressions like $fred{'stuff'} will still need to be escaped, though.
50 It also translates dashes that aren't used as hyphens into en dashes,
51 makes long dashes--like this--into proper em dashes, fixes "paired
52 quotes," makes C++ look right, puts a little space between double
53 underscores, makes ALLCAPS a teeny bit smaller in troff, and escapes
54 stuff that *roff treats as special so that you don't have to.
55 The recognized options to new() are as follows. All options take a
57 single argument.
58 center
60 Sets the centered page header to use instead of "User Contributed
61 Perl Documentation".
62 errors
64 How to report errors. "die" says to throw an exception on any POD
65 formatting error. "stderr" says to report errors on standard
66 error, but not to throw an exception. "pod" says to include a POD
67 ERRORS section in the resulting documentation summarizing the
68 errors. "none" ignores POD errors entirely, as much as possible.
69 The default is "output".
71 date
73 Sets the left-hand footer. By default, the modification date of
74 the input file will be used, or the current date if stat() can't
75 find that file (the case if the input is from "STDIN"), and the
76 date will be formatted as "YYYY-MM-DD".
77 fixed
79 The fixed-width font to use for verbatim text and code. Defaults
80 to "CW". Some systems may want "CR" instead. Only matters for
81 troff output.
82 fixedbold
84 Bold version of the fixed-width font. Defaults to "CB". Only
85 matters for troff output.
86 fixeditalic
88 Italic version of the fixed-width font (actually, something of a
89 misnomer, since most fixed-width fonts only have an oblique
90 version, not an italic version). Defaults to "CI". Only matters
91 for troff output.
92 fixedbolditalic
94 Bold italic (probably actually oblique) version of the fixed-width
95 font. Pod::Man doesn't assume you have this, and defaults to "CB".
96 Some systems (such as Solaris) have this font available as "CX".
97 Only matters for troff output.
98 name
100 Set the name of the manual page. Without this option, the manual
101 name is set to the uppercased base name of the file being converted
102 unless the manual section is 3, in which case the path is parsed to
103 see if it is a Perl module path. If it is, a path like
104 ".../lib/Pod/Man.pm" is converted into a name like "Pod::Man".
105 This option, if given, overrides any automatic determination of the
106 name.
107 nourls
109 Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text are
110 formatted to show both the anchor text and the URL. In other
111 words:
112 L<foo|http://example.com/>
114 is formatted as:
116 foo <http://example.com/>
118 This option, if set to a true value, suppresses the URL when anchor
120 text is given, so this example would be formatted as just "foo".
121 This can produce less cluttered output in cases where the URLs are
122 not particularly important.
123 quotes
125 Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text. If the value is a
126 single character, it is used as both the left and right quote; if
127 it is two characters, the first character is used as the left quote
128 and the second as the right quoted; and if it is four characters,
129 the first two are used as the left quote and the second two as the
130 right quote.
131 This may also be set to the special value "none", in which case no
133 quote marks are added around C<> text (but the font is still
134 changed for troff output).
135 release
137 Set the centered footer. By default, this is the version of Perl
138 you run Pod::Man under. Note that some system an macro sets assume
139 that the centered footer will be a modification date and will
140 prepend something like "Last modified: "; if this is the case, you
141 may want to set "release" to the last modified date and "date" to
142 the version number.
143 section
145 Set the section for the ".TH" macro. The standard section
146 numbering convention is to use 1 for user commands, 2 for system
147 calls, 3 for functions, 4 for devices, 5 for file formats, 6 for
148 games, 7 for miscellaneous information, and 8 for administrator
149 commands. There is a lot of variation here, however; some systems
150 (like Solaris) use 4 for file formats, 5 for miscellaneous
151 information, and 7 for devices. Still others use 1m instead of 8,
152 or some mix of both. About the only section numbers that are
153 reliably consistent are 1, 2, and 3.
154 By default, section 1 will be used unless the file ends in ".pm" in
156 which case section 3 will be selected.
157 stderr
159 Send error messages about invalid POD to standard error instead of
160 appending a POD ERRORS section to the generated *roff output. This
161 is equivalent to setting "errors" to "stderr" if "errors" is not
162 already set. It is supported for backward compatibility.
163 utf8
165 By default, Pod::Man produces the most conservative possible *roff
166 output to try to ensure that it will work with as many different
167 *roff implementations as possible. Many *roff implementations
168 cannot handle non-ASCII characters, so this means all non-ASCII
169 characters are converted either to a *roff escape sequence that
170 tries to create a properly accented character (at least for troff
171 output) or to "X".
172 If this option is set, Pod::Man will instead output UTF-8. If your
174 *roff implementation can handle it, this is the best output format
175 to use and avoids corruption of documents containing non-ASCII
176 characters. However, be warned that *roff source with literal
177 UTF-8 characters is not supported by many implementations and may
178 even result in segfaults and other bad behavior.
179 Be aware that, when using this option, the input encoding of your
181 POD source must be properly declared unless it is US-ASCII or
182 Latin-1. POD input without an "=encoding" command will be assumed
183 to be in Latin-1, and if it's actually in UTF-8, the output will be
184 double-encoded. See perlpod(1) for more information on the
185 "=encoding" command.
186 The standard Pod::Simple method parse_file() takes one argument naming
188 the POD file to read from. By default, the output is sent to "STDOUT",
189 but this can be changed with the output_fd() method.
190 The standard Pod::Simple method parse_from_file() takes up to two
192 arguments, the first being the input file to read POD from and the
193 second being the file to write the formatted output to.
194 You can also call parse_lines() to parse an array of lines or
196 parse_string_document() to parse a document already in memory. To put
197 the output into a string instead of a file handle, call the
198 output_string() method. See Pod::Simple for the specific details.
199
201 roff font should be 1 or 2 chars, not "%s"
202 (F) You specified a *roff font (using "fixed", "fixedbold", etc.)
203 that wasn't either one or two characters. Pod::Man doesn't support
204 *roff fonts longer than two characters, although some *roff
205 extensions do (the canonical versions of nroff and troff don't
206 either).
207 Invalid errors setting "%s"
209 (F) The "errors" parameter to the constructor was set to an unknown
210 value.
211 Invalid quote specification "%s"
213 (F) The quote specification given (the "quotes" option to the
214 constructor) was invalid. A quote specification must be one, two,
215 or four characters long.
216 POD document had syntax errors
218 (F) The POD document being formatted had syntax errors and the
219 "errors" option was set to "die".
220
222 Encoding handling assumes that PerlIO is available and does not work
223 properly if it isn't. The "utf8" option is therefore not supported
224 unless Perl is built with PerlIO support.
225 There is currently no way to turn off the guesswork that tries to
227 format unmarked text appropriately, and sometimes it isn't wanted
228 (particularly when using POD to document something other than Perl).
229 Most of the work toward fixing this has now been done, however, and all
230 that's still needed is a user interface.
231 The NAME section should be recognized specially and index entries
233 emitted for everything in that section. This would have to be deferred
234 until the next section, since extraneous things in NAME tends to
235 confuse various man page processors. Currently, no index entries are
236 emitted for anything in NAME.
237 Pod::Man doesn't handle font names longer than two characters. Neither
239 do most troff implementations, but GNU troff does as an extension. It
240 would be nice to support as an option for those who want to use it.
241 The preamble added to each output file is rather verbose, and most of
243 it is only necessary in the presence of non-ASCII characters. It would
244 ideally be nice if all of those definitions were only output if needed,
245 perhaps on the fly as the characters are used.
246 Pod::Man is excessively slow.
248
250 If Pod::Man is given the "utf8" option, the encoding of its output file
251 handle will be forced to UTF-8 if possible, overriding any existing
252 encoding. This will be done even if the file handle is not created by
253 Pod::Man and was passed in from outside. This maintains consistency
254 regardless of PERL_UNICODE and other settings.
255 The handling of hyphens and em dashes is somewhat fragile, and one may
257 get the wrong one under some circumstances. This should only matter
258 for troff output.
259 When and whether to use small caps is somewhat tricky, and Pod::Man
261 doesn't necessarily get it right.
262 Converting neutral double quotes to properly matched double quotes
264 doesn't work unless there are no formatting codes between the quote
265 marks. This only matters for troff output.
266
268 Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>, based very heavily on the original
269 pod2man by Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>. The modifications
270 to work with Pod::Simple instead of Pod::Parser were originally
271 contributed by Sean Burke (but I've since hacked them beyond
272 recognition and all bugs are mine).
273
275 Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008,
276 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>.
277 This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
279 under the same terms as Perl itself.
280
282 Pod::Simple, perlpod(1), pod2man(1), nroff(1), troff(1), man(1), man(7)
283 Ossanna, Joseph F., and Brian W. Kernighan. "Troff User's Manual,"
285 Computing Science Technical Report No. 54, AT&T Bell Laboratories.
286 This is the best documentation of standard nroff and troff. At the
287 time of this writing, it's available at
288 <http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr.html>.
289 The man page documenting the man macro set may be man(5) instead of
291 man(7) on your system. Also, please see pod2man(1) for extensive
292 documentation on writing manual pages if you've not done it before and
293 aren't familiar with the conventions.
294 The current version of this module is always available from its web
296 site at <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>. It is also
297 part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.
298perl v5.16.3 2013-01-02 Pod::Man(3)