Translators are available for converting Pod to various formats like plain text, HTML, man pages, and more.
Pod markup consists of three basic kinds of paragraphs: ordinary, verbatim, and command.
You can use formatting codes in ordinary paragraphs, for bold, italic, "code-style", hyperlinks, and more. Such codes are explained in the "Formatting Codes" section, below.
A verbatim paragraph is distinguished by having its first character be a space or a tab. (And commonly, all its lines begin with spaces and/or tabs.) It should be reproduced exactly, with tabs assumed to be on 8-column boundaries. There are no special formatting codes, so you can't italicize or anything like that. A \ means \, and nothing else.
All command paragraphs (which are typically only one line long) start with ``='', followed by an identifier, followed by arbitrary text that the command can use however it pleases. Currently recognized commands are
=pod
=head1 Heading Text
=head2 Heading Text
=head3 Heading Text
=head4 Heading Text
=over indentlevel
=item stuff
=back
=begin format
=end format
=for format text...
=encoding type
=cut
To explain them each in detail:
=head2 Object Attributes
The text ``Object Attributes'' comprises the heading there. (Note that head3 and head4 are recent additions, not supported in older Pod translators.) The text in these heading commands can use formatting codes, as seen here:
=head2 Possible Values for C<$/>
Such commands are explained in the "Formatting Codes" section, below.
=item Using C<$|> to Control Buffering
Such commands are explained in the "Formatting Codes" section, below.
Note also that there are some basic rules to using ``=over'' ... ``=back'' regions:
If you start with bullets or numbers, stick with them, as formatters use the first ``=item'' type to decide how to format the list.
=item stuff()
This function does stuff.
=cut
sub stuff {
...
}
=pod
Remember to check its return value, as in:
stuff() || die "Couldn't do stuff!";
=cut
A command "=begin
=begin html <hr> <img src="thang.png"> <p> This is a raw HTML paragraph </p> =end html
The command "=for formatname text..." specifies that the remainder of just this paragraph (starting right after formatname) is in that special format.
=for html <hr> <img src="thang.png"> <p> This is a raw HTML paragraph </p>
This means the same thing as the above ``=begin html'' ... ``=end html'' region.
That is, with ``=for'', you can have only one paragraph's worth of text (i.e., the text in ``=foo targetname text...''), but with ``=begin targetname'' ... ``=end targetname'', you can have any amount of stuff inbetween. (Note that there still must be a blank line after the ``=begin'' command and a blank line before the ``=end'' command.
Here are some examples of how to use these:
=begin html
<br>Figure 1.<br><IMG SRC="figure1.png"><br>
=end html
=begin text
---------------
| foo |
| bar |
---------------
^^^^ Figure 1. ^^^^
=end text
Some format names that formatters currently are known to accept include ``roff'', ``man'', ``latex'', ``tex'', ``text'', and ``html''. (Some formatters will treat some of these as synonyms.)
A format name of ``comment'' is common for just making notes (presumably to yourself) that won't appear in any formatted version of the Pod document:
=for comment Make sure that all the available options are documented!
Some formatnames will require a leading colon (as in "=for :formatname", or "=begin :formatname" ... "=end :formatname"), to signal that the text is not raw data, but instead is Pod text (i.e., possibly containing formatting codes) that's just not for normal formatting (e.g., may not be a normal-use paragraph, but might be for formatting as a footnote).
=encoding utf8 =encoding koi8-r =encoding ShiftJIS =encoding big5
And don't forget, when using any command, that the command lasts up until the end of its paragraph, not its line. So in the examples below, you can see that every command needs the blank line after it, to end its paragraph.
Some examples of lists include:
=over =item * First item =item * Second item =back =over =item Foo() Description of Foo function =item Bar() Description of Bar function =back
Link to a Perl manual page (e.g., "L<Net::Ping>"). Note that "name" should not contain spaces. This syntax is also occasionally used for references to UNIX man pages, as in "L<crontab(5)>".
Link to a section in other manual page. E.g., "L<perlsyn/"For Loops">"
Link to a section in this manual page. E.g., "L</"Object Methods">"
A section is started by the named heading or item. For example, "L<perlvar/$.>" or "L<perlvar/"$.">" both link to the section started by ""=item $."" in perlvar. And "L<perlsyn/For Loops>" or "L<perlsyn/"For Loops">" both link to the section started by ""=head2 For Loops"" in perlsyn.
To control what text is used for display, you use ""L<text|...>"", as in:
Link this text to that manual page. E.g., "L<Perl Error Messages|perldiag>"
Link this text to that section in that manual page. E.g., "L<postfix "if"|perlsyn/"Statement Modifiers">"
Link this text to that section in this manual page. E.g., "L<the various attributes|/"Member Data">"
Or you can link to a web page:
Links to an absolute URL. For example, "L<http://www.perl.org/>". But note that there is no corresponding "L<text|scheme:...>" syntax, for various reasons.
The above four are optional except in other formatting codes, notably "L<...>", and when preceded by a capital letter.
Some non-numeric HTML entity name, such as "E<eacute>", meaning the same thing as "é" in HTML --- i.e., a lowercase e with an acute (/-shaped) accent.
The ASCII/Latin-1/Unicode character with that number. A leading ``0x'' means that number is hex, as in "E<0x201E>". A leading ``0'' means that number is octal, as in "E<075>". Otherwise number is interpreted as being in decimal, as in "E<181>".
Note that older Pod formatters might not recognize octal or hex numeric escapes, and that many formatters cannot reliably render characters above 255. (Some formatters may even have to use compromised renderings of Latin-1 characters, like rendering "E<eacute>" as just a plain ``e''.)
Most of the time, you will need only a single set of angle brackets to delimit the beginning and end of formatting codes. However, sometimes you will want to put a real right angle bracket (a greater-than sign, '>') inside of a formatting code. This is particularly common when using a formatting code to provide a different font-type for a snippet of code. As with all things in Perl, there is more than one way to do it. One way is to simply escape the closing bracket using an "E" code:
C<$a E<lt>=E<gt> $b>
This will produce: ""$a <=> $b""
A more readable, and perhaps more ``plain'' way is to use an alternate set of delimiters that doesn't require a single ``>'' to be escaped. With the Pod formatters that are standard starting with perl5.5.660, doubled angle brackets (``<<'' and ``>>'') may be used if and only if there is whitespace right after the opening delimiter and whitespace right before the closing delimiter! For example, the following will do the trick:
C<< $a <=> $b >>
In fact, you can use as many repeated angle-brackets as you like so long as you have the same number of them in the opening and closing delimiters, and make sure that whitespace immediately follows the last '<' of the opening delimiter, and immediately precedes the first '>' of the closing delimiter. (The whitespace is ignored.) So the following will also work:
C<<< $a <=> $b >>>
C<<<< $a <=> $b >>>>
And they all mean exactly the same as this:
C<$a E<lt>=E<gt> $b>
As a further example, this means that if you wanted to put these bits of code in "C" (code) style:
open(X, ">>thing.dat") || die $!
$foo->bar();
you could do it like so:
C<<< open(X, ">>thing.dat") || die $! >>>
C<< $foo->bar(); >>
which is presumably easier to read than the old way:
C<open(X, "E<gt>E<gt>thing.dat") || die $!>
C<$foo-E<gt>bar();>
This is currently supported by pod2text (Pod::Text), pod2man (Pod::Man), and any other pod2xxx or Pod::Xxxx translators that use Pod::Parser 1.093 or later, or Pod::Tree 1.02 or later.
The Pod format is not necessarily sufficient for writing a book. Pod is just meant to be an idiot-proof common source for nroff, HTML, TeX, and other markup languages, as used for online documentation. Translators exist for pod2text, pod2html, pod2man (that's for nroff(1) and troff(1)), pod2latex, and pod2fm. Various others are available in CPAN.
__END__ =head1 NAME Time::Local - efficiently compute time from local and GMT time
Without that empty line before the ``=head1'', many translators wouldn't have recognized the ``=head1'' as starting a Pod block.
The podchecker command is provided for checking Pod syntax for errors and warnings. For example, it checks for completely blank lines in Pod blocks and for unknown commands and formatting codes. You should still also pass your document through one or more translators and proofread the result, or print out the result and proofread that. Some of the problems found may be bugs in the translators, which you may or may not wish to work around.
# - - - - - - - - - - - -
=item $firecracker->boom()
This noisily detonates the firecracker object.
=cut
sub boom {
...
...will make such Pod translators completely fail to see the Pod block at all.
Instead, have it like this:
# - - - - - - - - - - - -
=item $firecracker->boom()
This noisily detonates the firecracker object.
=cut
sub boom {
...