Sean M Burke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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.
Yes, this has been discussed ad nauseum on p5p in the past. :) > 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. I would miss it quite a lot. The summary of past discussion of this basically goes like this: Some people, like me, very much want guesswork. If I wanted to have to mark up everything in my documents, I could use DocBook or something; part of the reason why I use POD at all is because I can write in something very close to plain text. Furthermore, there isn't any way of expressing on POD the things that guesswork finds; for example, there is no correct way of marking up a function references like foo() using standard POD markup. Some people really don't like guesswork at all and don't want it ever turned on. You've expressed a good summary of that. Some people are happy with some of it and not with others and would be happy if there were a way to request particular types of guesswork. And finally, some guesswork is simply forced by the output medium. Handling of hyphens and dashes has to be done to *some* degree in *roff no matter what, and if one doesn't handle long dashes differently than hyphens, the printed output looks really ugly. Similarly for paired quotes; it makes a big difference in the quality of the printed output, at least in my opinion. And there are other things, like adding a thin space between adjacent underscores, that you just have to do. So.... Clearly, I agree that there should be some way of turning guesswork off if you don't want it. Just as clearly, from the above, I want to have it there for those of us who want it. Given the historic behavior of pod2man, I'll also argue that for pod2man in particular it should be on by default; Tom felt very strongly about that, and Larry seemed to agree, way back when. That doesn't mean it needs to be on for everything else. I've put a lot of effort into the guesswork in Pod::Man, getting it to not do the wrong thing in a variety of situations. Right now, it's pretty unobtrusive overall, I think. And in places where guesswork *can* be replaced with markup, I'm not sure I'd object to doing that (for example, only marking up man page references like foo(1) when they're written as L<foo(1)>). But last I heard, Tom utterly hated that idea. I think it would be nice to at some point address some of the shortcomings of POD that make guesswork necessary (and to deal with a few other things, like the fact that I<> right now is both emphasis and metasyntactic variables, which are *utterly* different things and should be marked up very differently by Pod::Text). But most of the proposals to extend the POD language end up going nowhere. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
