I'm pleased to announce release v6.0.0 of podlators.
I usually don't announce releases here, but since there was an extensive
discussion of some of the changes that went into this release, I thought
I'd send the release announcement. Let me know if you'd like me to send
podlators release announcements here in the future when they have changes
to Pod::Man.
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.
Changes from previous release:
- Drop support for Perl 5.10. podlators now requires Perl 5.12 or later.
- podlators now uses semantic versioning for the package and module
versions, with a v prefix to work with Perl's packaging system.
- Pod::Man now translates all "-" characters in the input into *roff "\-"
escapes (normally rendered as an ASCII hyphen-minus, U+002D) rather
than using fragile heuristics to decide which characters represent true
hyphens and which represent ASCII hyphen-minus. The previous
heuristics misrendered command names such as apt-get, causing search
and cut-and-paste issues. This change may cause line-break issues with
long hyphenated phrases. In cases where the intent is a true hyphen,
consider using UTF-8 as the POD character set (declared with =encoding)
and using true Unicode hyphens instead of the ASCII "-" character.
- Pod::Man now disables the special *roff interpretation of "`" and "'"
characters as paired quotes everywhere, not just in verbatim text, thus
forcing them to be interpreted as the regular ASCII characters. This
also disables the use of "``" and "''" for paired double-quotes. The
rationale is similar to that for hyphens: there is no way to tell from
the POD source that the special interpretation as quotes is intended.
To produce paired typographic quotes in the output, use UTF-8 and
Unicode paired quote characters.
- Man page references in L<> that are detected as such by Pod::Simple are
now always formatted as man page references even if our normal
heuristic would not detect them. This fixes the formatting of
constructions such as @@RXVT_NAME@@perl(3), which are used by packages
that format a man page with POD and then substitute variables into it
at build time. Thanks to Marco Sirabella for the analysis and an
initial patch. (GitHub #21)
- Add a workaround to Pod::Man to force persistent ragged-right
justification under nroff with groff 1.23.0. Thanks to Guillem Jover
for the report and G. Branden Robinson for the analysis. (GitHub #23)
- Fix wrapping of text with S<> markup in all subclasses of Pod::Text.
Thanks to Jim Avera for the report. (GitHub #24)
- Pod::Man now forces a blank line after a nested list contains only
=item tags without bodies. In previous versions, the blank line before
the next item in the surrounding =over block was not included. Thanks
to Julien ÉLIE for the report. (GitHub #26)
- Import PerlIO before checking for layers so that PerlIO::F_UTF8 is
available, which fixes double-encoding of output when a :utf8 layer is
in place and PerlIO is not imported. Thanks to youpong for the bug
report, James Keenan for the elaboration, and Graham Knop for the fix.
(GitHub #25)
- pod2text --help now exits with status 0, not 1, matching normal UNIX
command behavior and the behavior of pod2man. (GitHub #19)
- Fix tests when NO_COLOR is set in the environment. (GitHub #20)
You can download it from CPAN or from:
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>
This package is maintained using Git; see the instructions on the above
page to access the Git repository.
Please let me know of any problems or feature requests not already listed
in the TODO file.
--
Russ Allbery (ea...@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
