1POD2TEXT(1)           User Contributed Perl Documentation          POD2TEXT(1)
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NAME

6       pod2text - Convert POD data to formatted ASCII text
7

SYNOPSIS

9       pod2text [-aclostu] [--code] [-e encoding]
10           [--errors=style] [--guesswork=rule[,rule...]]
11           [-i indent] [-q quotes]
12           [--nourls] [--stderr] [-w width] [input [output ...]]
13
14       pod2text -h
15

DESCRIPTION

17       pod2text is a wrapper script around the Pod::Text and its subclasses.
18       It uses them to generate formatted text from POD source.  It can
19       optionally use either termcap sequences or ANSI color escape sequences
20       to format the text.
21
22       input is the file to read for POD source (the POD can be embedded in
23       code).  If input isn't given, it defaults to "STDIN".  output, if
24       given, is the file to which to write the formatted output.  If output
25       isn't given, the formatted output is written to "STDOUT".  Several POD
26       files can be processed in the same pod2text invocation (saving module
27       load and compile times) by providing multiple pairs of input and output
28       files on the command line.
29
30       By default, the output encoding is the same as the encoding of the
31       input file, or UTF-8 if that encoding is not set (except on EBCDIC
32       systems).  See the -e option to explicitly set the output encoding and
33       "Encoding" in Pod::Text for more discussion.
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OPTIONS

36       Each option is annotated with the version of podlators in which that
37       option was added with its current meaning.
38
39       -a, --alt
40           [1.00] Use an alternate output format that, among other things,
41           uses a different heading style and marks "=item" entries with a
42           colon in the left margin.
43
44       --code
45           [1.11] Include any non-POD text from the input file in the output
46           as well.  Useful for viewing code documented with POD blocks with
47           the POD rendered and the code left intact.
48
49       -c, --color
50           [1.00] Format the output with ANSI color escape sequences.  Using
51           this option requires that Term::ANSIColor be installed on your
52           system.
53
54       -e encoding, --encoding=encoding
55           [5.00] Specifies the encoding of the output.  encoding must be an
56           encoding recognized by the Encode module (see Encode::Supported).
57           If the output contains characters that cannot be represented in
58           this encoding, that is an error that will be reported as configured
59           by the "errors" option.  If error handling is other than "die", the
60           unrepresentable character will be replaced with the Encode
61           substitution character (normally "?").
62
63           WARNING: The input encoding of the POD source is independent from
64           the output encoding, and setting this option does not affect the
65           interpretation of the POD input.  Unless your POD source is US-
66           ASCII, its encoding should be declared with the "=encoding" command
67           in the source, as near to the top of the file as possible.  If this
68           is not done, Pod::Simple will will attempt to guess the encoding
69           and may be successful if it's Latin-1 or UTF-8, but it will produce
70           warnings.  See perlpod(1) for more information.
71
72       --errors=style
73           [2.5.0] Set the error handling style.  "die" says to throw an
74           exception on any POD formatting error.  "stderr" says to report
75           errors on standard error, but not to throw an exception.  "pod"
76           says to include a POD ERRORS section in the resulting documentation
77           summarizing the errors.  "none" ignores POD errors entirely, as
78           much as possible.
79
80           The default is "die".
81
82       --guesswork=rule[,rule...]
83           [5.01] By default, pod2text applies some default formatting rules
84           based on guesswork and regular expressions that are intended to
85           make writing Perl documentation easier and require less explicit
86           markup.  These rules may not always be appropriate, particularly
87           for documentation that isn't about Perl.  This option allows
88           turning all or some of it off.
89
90           The special rule "all" enables all guesswork.  This is also the
91           default for backward compatibility reasons.  The special rule
92           "none" disables all guesswork.  Otherwise, the value of this option
93           should be a comma-separated list of one or more of the following
94           keywords:
95
96           quoting
97               If no guesswork is enabled, any text enclosed in C<> is
98               surrounded by double quotes in nroff (terminal) output unless
99               the contents are already quoted.  When this guesswork is
100               enabled, quote marks will also be suppressed for Perl
101               variables, function names, function calls, numbers, and hex
102               constants.
103
104           Any unknown guesswork name is silently ignored (for potential
105           future compatibility), so be careful about spelling.
106
107       -i indent, --indent=indent
108           [1.00] Set the number of spaces to indent regular text, and the
109           default indentation for "=over" blocks.  Defaults to 4 spaces if
110           this option isn't given.
111
112       -h, --help
113           [1.00] Print out usage information and exit.
114
115       -l, --loose
116           [1.00] Print a blank line after a "=head1" heading.  Normally, no
117           blank line is printed after "=head1", although one is still printed
118           after "=head2", because this is the expected formatting for manual
119           pages; if you're formatting arbitrary text documents, using this
120           option is recommended.
121
122       -m width, --left-margin=width, --margin=width
123           [1.24] The width of the left margin in spaces.  Defaults to 0.
124           This is the margin for all text, including headings, not the amount
125           by which regular text is indented; for the latter, see -i option.
126
127       --nourls
128           [2.5.0] Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text
129           are formatted to show both the anchor text and the URL.  In other
130           words:
131
132               L<foo|http://example.com/>
133
134           is formatted as:
135
136               foo <http://example.com/>
137
138           This flag, if given, suppresses the URL when anchor text is given,
139           so this example would be formatted as just "foo".  This can produce
140           less cluttered output in cases where the URLs are not particularly
141           important.
142
143       -o, --overstrike
144           [1.06] Format the output with overstrike printing.  Bold text is
145           rendered as character, backspace, character.  Italics and file
146           names are rendered as underscore, backspace, character.  Many
147           pagers, such as less, know how to convert this to bold or
148           underlined text.
149
150       -q quotes, --quotes=quotes
151           [4.00] Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text to quotes.
152           If quotes is a single character, it is used as both the left and
153           right quote.  Otherwise, it is split in half, and the first half of
154           the string is used as the left quote and the second is used as the
155           right quote.
156
157           quotes may also be set to the special value "none", in which case
158           no quote marks are added around C<> text.
159
160       -s, --sentence
161           [1.00] Assume each sentence ends with two spaces and try to
162           preserve that spacing.  Without this option, all consecutive
163           whitespace in non-verbatim paragraphs is compressed into a single
164           space.
165
166       --stderr
167           [2.1.3] By default, pod2text dies if any errors are detected in the
168           POD input.  If --stderr is given and no --errors flag is present,
169           errors are sent to standard error, but pod2text does not abort.
170           This is equivalent to "--errors=stderr" and is supported for
171           backward compatibility.
172
173       -t, --termcap
174           [1.00] Try to determine the width of the screen and the bold and
175           underline sequences for the terminal from termcap, and use that
176           information in formatting the output.  Output will be wrapped at
177           two columns less than the width of your terminal device.  Using
178           this option requires that your system have a termcap file somewhere
179           where Term::Cap can find it and requires that your system support
180           termios.  With this option, the output of pod2text will contain
181           terminal control sequences for your current terminal type.
182
183       -u, --utf8
184           [2.2.0] Set the output encoding to UTF-8.  This is equivalent to
185           "--encoding=UTF-8" and is supported for backward compatibility.
186
187       -w, --width=width, -width
188           [1.00] The column at which to wrap text on the right-hand side.
189           Defaults to 76, unless -t is given, in which case it's two columns
190           less than the width of your terminal device.
191

EXIT STATUS

193       As long as all documents processed result in some output, even if that
194       output includes errata (a "POD ERRORS" section generated with
195       "--errors=pod"), pod2text will exit with status 0.  If any of the
196       documents being processed do not result in an output document, pod2text
197       will exit with status 1.  If there are syntax errors in a POD document
198       being processed and the error handling style is set to the default of
199       "die", pod2text will abort immediately with exit status 255.
200

DIAGNOSTICS

202       If pod2text fails with errors, see Pod::Text and Pod::Simple for
203       information about what those errors might mean.  Internally, it can
204       also produce the following diagnostics:
205
206       -c (--color) requires Term::ANSIColor be installed
207           (F) -c or --color were given, but Term::ANSIColor could not be
208           loaded.
209
210       Unknown option: %s
211           (F) An unknown command line option was given.
212
213       In addition, other Getopt::Long error messages may result from invalid
214       command-line options.
215

ENVIRONMENT

217       COLUMNS
218           If -t is given, pod2text will take the current width of your screen
219           from this environment variable, if available.  It overrides
220           terminal width information in TERMCAP.
221
222       TERMCAP
223           If -t is given, pod2text will use the contents of this environment
224           variable if available to determine the correct formatting sequences
225           for your current terminal device.
226

AUTHOR

228       Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>.
229
231       Copyright 1999-2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012-2019, 2022 Russ
232       Allbery <rra@cpan.org>
233
234       This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
235       under the same terms as Perl itself.
236

SEE ALSO

238       Encode::Supported, Pod::Text, Pod::Text::Color, Pod::Text::Overstrike,
239       Pod::Text::Termcap, Pod::Simple, perlpod(1)
240
241       The current version of this script is always available from its web
242       site at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>.  It is also
243       part of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.
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247perl v5.36.0                      2023-01-20                       POD2TEXT(1)
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