Pod::SimpleText version 0.01
                  (Format POD source into ASCII text)

 Copyright 1999 Russ Allbery <[email protected]>.  All rights reserved.
 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
 under the same terms as Perl itself.


INTRODUCTION

 This package is a proposed replacement for pod2text and Pod::Text in the
 current Perl distribution.  The modules contained in it use Pod::Parser
 rather than doing the POD parsing themselves, and are designed to be
 object-oriented and very easy to subclass.  As an example, two useful
 subclasses of Pod::SimpleText are also included:  Pod::Text::Color,
 which uses ANSI color escape sequences to highlight text, and
 Pod::Text::Termcap, which determines the correct control sequences to
 embolden and underline text from terminal termcap information.

 The output of Pod::SimpleText should be identical to the output of the
 original Pod::Text module, except for fixed bugs.  This has been tested
 by comparing the output of both modules when run on perlfunc.pod from
 the Perl 5.005_02 distribution, and also by comparing output for several
 other shorter pages.

 Known bugs fixed relative to Pod::Text:  The first line of text after an
 =item command is wrapped correctly, various problems with L<> text have
 been fixed, and if you use Pod::Text::Termcap, the termcap sequences
 work correctly and use POSIX termios to determine the terminal speed.

 There are also a number of additional features, mostly finer control of
 the output of the module under a variety of circumstances.  The
 programmatic interface is also cleaner.


INSTALLATION

 Follow the standard installation procedure for Perl modules, which is to
 type the following commands:

         perl Makefile.PL
         make
         make test
         make install

 You'll probably need to do the last as root.  This will also install a
 driver script named pod2txt; see it's man page for more information.

 Note that in order to use Pod::Text::Color, you have to have the module
 Term::ANSIColor (available from CPAN) installed.


THANKS

 To Tom Christiansen, for writing the original Pod::Text.  This module is
 based very heavily on that, particularly the termcap handling, and its
 output is designed to mimic the output of that module.

 To Brad Appleton, for writing Pod::Parser, which made writing this
 entire package the work of a single Saturday.


                                               Russ Allbery
                                               [email protected]