POD2TEXT(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide POD2TEXT(1)
NAME
pod2text - Convert POD data to formatted ASCII text
SYNOPSIS
pod2text [-aclostu] [--code] [--errors=style] [-i indent]
[-q quotes] [--nourls] [--stderr] [-w width]
[input [output ...]]
pod2text -h
DESCRIPTION
pod2text is a front-end for Pod::Text and its subclasses. It uses them
to generate formatted ASCII text from POD source. It can optionally use
either termcap sequences or ANSI color escape sequences to format the
text.
input is the file to read for POD source (the POD can be embedded in
code). If input isn't given, it defaults to "STDIN". output, if given,
is the file to which to write the formatted output. If output isn't
given, the formatted output is written to "STDOUT". Several POD files
can be processed in the same pod2text invocation (saving module load and
compile times) by providing multiple pairs of input and output files on
the command line.
OPTIONS
-a, --alt
Use an alternate output format that, among other things, uses a
different heading style and marks "=item" entries with a colon in the
left margin.
--code
Include any non-POD text from the input file in the output as well.
Useful for viewing code documented with POD blocks with the POD
rendered and the code left intact.
-c, --color
Format the output with ANSI color escape sequences. Using this
option requires that Term::ANSIColor be installed on your system.
--errors=style
Set the error handling style. "die" says to throw an exception on
any POD formatting error. "stderr" says to report errors on standard
error, but not to throw an exception. "pod" says to include a POD
ERRORS section in the resulting documentation summarizing the errors.
"none" ignores POD errors entirely, as much as possible.
The default is "die".
-i indent, --indent=indent
Set the number of spaces to indent regular text, and the default
indentation for "=over" blocks. Defaults to 4 spaces if this option
isn't given.
-h, --help
Print out usage information and exit.
-l, --loose
Print a blank line after a "=head1" heading. Normally, no blank line
is printed after "=head1", although one is still printed after
"=head2", because this is the expected formatting for manual pages;
if you're formatting arbitrary text documents, using this option is
recommended.
-m width, --left-margin=width, --margin=width
The width of the left margin in spaces. Defaults to 0. This is the
margin for all text, including headings, not the amount by which
regular text is indented; for the latter, see -i option.
--nourls
Normally, L<> formatting codes with a URL but anchor text are
formatted to show both the anchor text and the URL. In other words:
L<foo|http://example.com/>
is formatted as:
foo <http://example.com/>
This flag, if given, suppresses the URL when anchor text is given, so
this example would be formatted as just "foo". This can produce less
cluttered output in cases where the URLs are not particularly
important.
-o, --overstrike
Format the output with overstrike printing. Bold text is rendered as
character, backspace, character. Italics and file names are rendered
as underscore, backspace, character. Many pagers, such as less, know
how to convert this to bold or underlined text.
-q quotes, --quotes=quotes
Sets the quote marks used to surround C<> text to quotes. If quotes
is a single character, it is used as both the left and right quote.
Otherwise, it is split in half, and the first half of the string is
used as the left quote and the second is used as the right quote.
quotes may also be set to the special value "none", in which case no
quote marks are added around C<> text.
-s, --sentence
Assume each sentence ends with two spaces and try to preserve that
spacing. Without this option, all consecutive whitespace in non-
verbatim paragraphs is compressed into a single space.
--stderr
By default, pod2text dies if any errors are detected in the POD
input. If --stderr is given and no --errors flag is present, errors
are sent to standard error, but pod2text does not abort. This is
equivalent to "--errors=stderr" and is supported for backward
compatibility.
-t, --termcap
Try to determine the width of the screen and the bold and underline
sequences for the terminal from termcap, and use that information in
formatting the output. Output will be wrapped at two columns less
than the width of your terminal device. Using this option requires
that your system have a termcap file somewhere where Term::Cap can
find it and requires that your system support termios. With this
option, the output of pod2text will contain terminal control
sequences for your current terminal type.
-u, --utf8
By default, pod2text tries to use the same output encoding as its
input encoding (to be backward-compatible with older versions). This
option says to instead force the output encoding to UTF-8.
Be aware that, when using this option, the input encoding of your POD
source should be properly declared unless it's US-ASCII. Pod::Simple
will attempt to guess the encoding and may be successful if it's
Latin-1 or UTF-8, but it will warn, which by default results in a
pod2text failure. Use the "=encoding" command to declare the
encoding. See perlpod(1) for more information.
-w, --width=width, -width
The column at which to wrap text on the right-hand side. Defaults to
76, unless -t is given, in which case it's two columns less than the
width of your terminal device.
EXIT STATUS
As long as all documents processed result in some output, even if that
output includes errata (a "POD ERRORS" section generated with
"--errors=pod"), pod2text will exit with status 0. If any of the
documents being processed do not result in an output document, pod2text
will exit with status 1. If there are syntax errors in a POD document
being processed and the error handling style is set to the default of
"die", pod2text will abort immediately with exit status 255.
DIAGNOSTICS
If pod2text fails with errors, see Pod::Text and Pod::Simple for
information about what those errors might mean. Internally, it can also
produce the following diagnostics:
-c (--color) requires Term::ANSIColor be installed
(F) -c or --color were given, but Term::ANSIColor could not be
loaded.
Unknown option: %s
(F) An unknown command line option was given.
In addition, other Getopt::Long error messages may result from invalid
command-line options.
ENVIRONMENT
COLUMNS
If -t is given, pod2text will take the current width of your screen
from this environment variable, if available. It overrides terminal
width information in TERMCAP.
TERMCAP
If -t is given, pod2text will use the contents of this environment
variable if available to determine the correct formatting sequences
for your current terminal device.
AUTHOR
Russ Allbery <rra@cpan.org>.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright 1999-2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012-2018 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.
SEE ALSO
Pod::Text, Pod::Text::Color, Pod::Text::Overstrike, Pod::Text::Termcap,
Pod::Simple, perlpod(1)
The current version of this script is always available from its web site
at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>. It is also part
of the Perl core distribution as of 5.6.0.
perl v5.30.3 2021-11-13 POD2TEXT(1)