WARNING: This package requires Pod::Simple be installed. For best results, Pod::Simple 3.03 or later is required. The modules should work with Pod::Simple 3.00 through 3.02, but the test suite will fail and some handling of whitespace will be incorrect.
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.
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.
Pod::Text
The default output of Pod::Text should be mostly identical to the output of the original Pod::Text module, except for fixed bugs. This has been tested by comparing the output of both modules when run on perlfunc.pod from the Perl 5.005_02 distribution, by comparing output for several other shorter pages, and by using the Pod::Parser test suite.
Known bugs fixed relative to the original Pod::Text: The first line of text after an =item command is wrapped correctly, various problems with L<> text have been fixed, and if you use Pod::Text::Termcap, the termcap sequences work correctly and use POSIX termios to determine the terminal speed.
There are also a number of additional features, mostly finer control of the output of the module under a variety of circumstances. The programmatic interface is also cleaner.
Pod::Man
The output of Pod::Man should be mostly identical to the output of the old pod2man script except for fixed bugs and added new features. This has been tested by comparing the output of both modules given a variety of different input.
Known bugs fixed relative to pod2man: Nested fonts now work correctly, nested =over/=back pairs now work correctly, double quotes are now correct in headings and =item tags, hyphens and en dashes are now more frequently correct, use of small caps is now more consistent and correct, em dashes are now more frequently correct and double dashes for things like long options are no longer converted to em dashes, various hyphenation problems have been fixed by always turning off hyphenation, and index entries no longer cause trailing whitespace and are emitted close to the relevant text.
Additional features over pod2man include a shorter and better documented prelude, inclusion of "" quotes around some sections marked with C<> when viewed using nroff, and a better programmatic interface.
Roman Kulik