Pod::Man - phpMan

Pod::Man(3perl) Perl Programmers Reference Guide Pod::Man(3perl)

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 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).

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 v5.34.0 2023-11-23 Pod::Man(3perl)

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