podlators version 2.5.3
             (Format POD source into various output formats)

              Maintained by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>

  Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008,
  2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>.  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

  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 use Pod::Text::Color, Term::ANSIColor is required.  It is available
  from CPAN and part of Perl core as of 5.6.0.

  PerlIO support is required for Pod::Text to set the output encoding to
  match the input encoding (which it does unless the utf8 option is used).
  Without this, the output will use Perl's internal encoding, which may be
  surprising and may produce Perl warnings.

  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.

INSTALLATION

  WARNING: Installation of this package will replace the pod2text and
  pod2man scripts that come with Perl, and for Perl 5.6.0 or later the
  versions of Pod::Text and Pod::Man installed with Perl.  Make sure that
  you have a version of this package as new as or newer than the modules
  that come with Perl.  For older versions of Perl, pod2text and pod2man
  will still be overwritten, but Pod::Text will not be, making many of the
  options in pod2text not actually useable unless you overwrite the
  version that comes with Perl with it (since Perl looks in its own
  directories before it looks in site_perl).  Note also that the version
  in this package attempts to be backwards-compatible but is not bug
  compatible, and some things like the default wrap margin have changed.
  The version contained in this package is the default version for Perl
  5.5.560 or thereabouts and higher, but may be slightly newer depending
  on how updates have been synchronized.

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

      perl Makefile.PL
      make
      make install

  You'll probably need to do the "make install" as root.  This will also
  install driver scripts named pod2text and pod2man; see their man pages
  for more information.

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@stanford.edu.