At 19:50 2002-09-30 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: >Which Pod::Man are you looking at? I removed that in revision 1.17 >[...]If you're looking at that old of a version of Pod::Man, you're probably >getting a very skewed notion of how it's implemented. I've cleaned some >things up and completely rewritten others since then. :)
It's a 1.15 -- which I now suddenly realize is ancient, even this is a new install of ActiveState Perl! You're right, http://search.cpan.org/src/RRA/podlators-1.24/lib/Pod/Man.pm seems much better. I still see lots of guesswork still in there, like italicizing foo() and foo(1), and trying to guess at turning " into a smart-quote going in the appropriate direction. I don't know how much of that *roff forces you to do, but I tend to dislike that sort of thing, since it's often unexpected, and there's typically no way to turn it off (or correct it) when it goes wrong. It's invisibly nice when it works right, but so maddening when it goes wrong that I think it's not even worth the effort to even try. I've been doing all my Pod browsing (and hardcopying) thru a custom pod2rtf for about two years now (basically now reimplemented as the Pod::Simple::RTF in the current Pod-Simple dist). It doesn't implement any of that sort of guesswork, and I haven't missed one a bit. -- Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
