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]