README

                             podlators v6.0.2
             (format POD source into various output formats)
                Maintained by Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>

  Copyright 1999-2024 Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>.  This software is
  distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.  Please see the section
  LICENSE below for more information.

BLURB

  podlators contains Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules which convert POD
  input to *roff source output, suitable for man pages, or plain text.  It
  also includes several subclasses of Pod::Text for formatted output to
  terminals with various capabilities.  It is the source package for the
  Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules included with Perl.

DESCRIPTION

  POD is the Plain Old Documentation format, the documentation language
  used for all of Perl's documentation.  I learned it to document Perl
  modules, started using it for Perl scripts as well, and discovered it
  was the most convenient way I've found to write program documentation.
  It's extremely simple, well-designed for writing Unix manual pages (and
  I'm a traditionalist who thinks that any program should have a regular
  manual page), and easily readable in the raw format by humans.

  The translators into text and nroff (for manual pages) included in the
  Perl distribution had various bugs, however, and used their own ad hoc
  parsers, so when I started running into those bugs and when a new
  generic parser (Pod::Parser) was written, I decided to rewrite the two
  translators that I use the most and fix the bugs that were bothering me.
  This package is the result.

  podlators contains two main modules, Pod::Man and Pod::Text.  The former
  converts POD into nroff/troff source and the latter into plain text
  (with various options controlling some of the formatting).  There are
  also several subclasses of Pod::Text for generating slightly formatted
  text using color or other terminal control escapes, and a general
  utility module, Pod::ParseLink, for parsing the POD L<> formatting
  sequences.  Also included in this package are the pod2text and pod2man
  driver scripts.

  Both Pod::Text and Pod::Man provide a variety of options for fine-tuning
  their output.  Pod::Man also tries to massage input text where
  appropriate to produce better output when run through nroff or troff,
  such as distinguishing between different types of hyphens.

  As of Perl 5.6.0, my implementation was included in Perl core, and each
  release of Perl will have the at-the-time most current version of
  podlators included.  You therefore only need to install this package
  yourself if you need a newer version than came with Perl (to get some
  bug fixes, for example).

REQUIREMENTS

  This module requires Perl 5.12 or later and Pod::Simple 3.26 or later.
  (Pod::Simple 3.26 was included in Perl 5.17.10.)

  The troff/nroff generated by Pod::Man should be compatible with any
  troff or nroff implementation with the -man macro set, including mandoc.
  It is primarily tested by me under GNU groff, but Perl users send bug
  reports for a wide variety of implementations and Pod::Man is used to
  generate all of Perl's own manual pages, so hopefully most of the bugs
  have been weeded out.

BUILDING AND INSTALLATION

  podlators uses ExtUtils::MakeMaker and can be installed using the same
  process as any other ExtUtils::MakeMaker module:

      perl Makefile.PL
      make
      make install

  You will have to run the last command as root unless you're installing
  into a local Perl module tree in your home directory.

TESTING

  podlators comes with a test suite, which you can run after building
  with:

      make test

  If a test fails, you can run a single test with verbose output via:

      prove -vb <path-to-test>

  The following additional Perl modules will be used by the test suite if
  present:

  * Test::CPAN::Changes (part of CPAN-Changes)
  * Test::Kwalitee
  * Test::MinimumVersion
  * Test::Perl::Critic
  * Test::Pod
  * Test::Spelling
  * Test::Strict
  * Test::Synopsis

  All are available on CPAN.  Those tests will be skipped if the modules
  are not available.

  To enable tests that don't detect functionality problems but are used to
  sanity-check the release, set the environment variable RELEASE_TESTING
  to a true value.  To enable tests that may be sensitive to the local
  environment or that produce a lot of false positives without uncovering
  many problems, set the environment variable AUTHOR_TESTING to a true
  value.

SUPPORT

  The podlators web page at:

      https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/

  will always have the current version of this package, the current
  documentation, and pointers to any additional resources.

  New podlators releases are announced on the pod-people mailing list.  To
  subscribe or see the list archives, go to:

      https://lists.perl.org/list/pod-people.html

  For bug tracking, use the issue tracker on GitHub:

      https://github.com/rra/podlators/issues

  Please be aware that I tend to be extremely busy and work projects often
  take priority.  I'll save your report and get to it as soon as I can,
  but it may take me a couple of months.

SOURCE REPOSITORY

  podlators is maintained using Git.  You can access the current source on
  GitHub at:

      https://github.com/rra/podlators

  or by cloning the repository at:

      https://git.eyrie.org/git/perl/podlators.git

  or view the repository via the web at:

      https://git.eyrie.org/?p=perl/podlators.git

  The eyrie.org repository is the canonical one, maintained by the author,
  but using GitHub is probably more convenient for most purposes.  Pull
  requests are gratefully reviewed and normally accepted.

LICENSE

  The podlators package as a whole is covered by the following copyright
  statement and license:

    Copyright 1999-2024 Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>

    This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the same terms as Perl itself.  This means that you may
    choose between the two licenses that Perl is released under: the GNU
    GPL and the Artistic License.  Please see your Perl distribution for
    the details and copies of the licenses.

  Some files in this distribution are individually released under
  different licenses, all of which are compatible with the above general
  package license but which may require preservation of additional
  notices.  All required notices, and detailed information about the
  licensing of each file, are recorded in the LICENSE file.

  Files covered by a license with an assigned SPDX License Identifier
  include SPDX-License-Identifier tags to enable automated processing of
  license information.  See https://spdx.org/licenses/ for more
  information.

  For any copyright range specified by files in this package as YYYY-ZZZZ,
  the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.