                          podlators version 4.01
             (Format POD source into various output formats)

              Maintained by Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>

  Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008,
  2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 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.

  I welcome all bug reports and patches for this package (and in
  particular, if you're looking for a project, see TODO).  However, please
  be aware that I tend to be extremely busy and to get a lot of mail.
  I'll save your mail and get to it as soon as I can, but depending on how
  busy I am it may take me a couple of months.

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

  This package contains the replacement for pod2text and Pod::Text in
  versions of Perl 5.005 and earlier.  It also contains Pod::Man and
  pod2man, the replacement for pod2man found in Perl distributions prior
  to 5.6.0.  The modules contained in it use Pod::Simple rather than doing
  the POD parsing themselves, and are designed to be object-oriented and
  to subclass.  As an example, three useful subclasses of Pod::Text are
  also included: Pod::Text::Color, which uses ANSI color escape sequences
  to highlight text, Pod::Text::Termcap, which determines the correct
  control sequences to embolden and underline text from terminal termcap
  information, and Pod::Text::Overstrike, which uses the backspacing
  method of underlining and bold also used by the output of nroff.

  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 and using
  slightly smaller case for acronyms.

  A general parser utility module for L<> formatting code parsing is also
  included, Pod::ParseLink.  This implements only the simple parse
  described in perlpodspec.  It is no longer used by the modules here
  (Pod::Simple has a separate implementation of the same concept), but is
  included in case others find it useful.

REQUIREMENTS

  Perl 5.6.0 or later and Module::Build are required to build this module.
  Both Pod::Man and Pod::Text are built on Pod::Simple, which handles the
  basic POD parsing and character set conversion.  Pod::Simple 3.06 or
  later is required (and Pod::Simple 3.07 is recommended).  It is
  available from CPAN and part of Perl core as of 5.10.0.  Encode is also
  required (included in Perl core since 5.8.0).

  To run the test suite, Test::More is required.  It is available from
  CPAN and part of Perl core as of 5.6.2.

  The test suite includes a formatting and spelling check of all of the
  POD documentation.  To check formatting, Test::Pod is required.  To
  check spelling, Pod::Spell and either aspell or ispell with the american
  dictionary are also required.  The user's path is searched for aspell or
  ispell and aspell is preferred.  Spelling tests are disabled by default
  since spelling dictionaries differ too much between systems.  To enable
  those tests, set RRA_MAINTAINER_TESTS to a true value.

BUILDING AND INSTALLATION

  Installation of this package will shadow the Pod::Man, Pod::Text, and
  subclasses that come with Perl.  The ones from Perl will not be
  overwritten, but the ones installed by this package will generally take
  precendent.  This may result in different behavior than using the
  versions in Perl.  It will probably also shadow the perlpodstyle man
  page.

  Normally, the pod2man and pod2text scripts installed by this package
  will go into a directory like /usr/local/bin.  Be sure that this
  directory is earlier in your PATH than the directory containing the
  modules installed by Perl itself (often /usr/bin).  Otherwise, you will
  call the new modules with the old driver scripts, which may cause
  various problems.

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

      perl Makefile.PL
      make
      make test
      make install

  You'll probably need to do the last step as root.  This will also
  install driver scripts named pod2text and pod2man and the perlpodstyle
  man page.

HOMEPAGE AND SOURCE REPOSITORY

  The podlators web page at:

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

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

  podlators is maintained using Git.  You can access the current source
  by cloning the repository at:

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

  or view the repository on the web at:

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

  You can file bug reports for this package in RT at:

      https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=podlators

  or send me mail directly at rra@cpan.org.
