pod2text

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]
           [-qquotes] [--nourls] [--stderr] [-wwidth]
           [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 v5.30.0                      2023-11-23                       POD2TEXT(1)