podlators 5.00

podlators is my collection of POD formatting modules, which generate *roff or text (possibly with escape sequence markup) from the documentation format used by Perl and some other packages.

This is a major release, the biggest since the Pod::Simple rewrite in 2005. The headline news is that after some fairly extensive investigation, this release of Pod::Man finally changes the default output format to Unicode. No more replacement of characters in people's names, or text in non-English languages, with ugly X characters! There is a new encoding option to set the output encoding, and new options groff (which uses the groff extension for Unicode code points and is the default on EBCDIC systmes) and roff (which does the old, broken X substitution).

Since this was a major backward-incompatible change, I also finally removed most of the formatting touch-ups that Pod::Man tried to do for troff output but which would be invisible for the (by far more commonly used) nroff output. These have been an endless source of bugs and are very difficult to maintain, most of them were of marginal utility, and I am dubious many people are using troff to print Perl manual pages these days instead of, say, printing the rendered output from one of the many excellent POD to HTML modules.

There is some remaining somewhat-Perl-specific guesswork applied to the formatting, which is much simpler, but even that can now be turned off with the new guesswork option. This will allow people using POD to generate manual pages for things other than Perl modules to disable the Perl-specific markup logic.

Pod::Text also now supports encoding and gets some major encoding cleanups, including using Encode instead of PerlIO encoding layers for its output.

There are also numerous other fixes and improvements: a new language option to Pod::Man to configure (in an unfortunately groff-specific way) the line-breaking rules for languages like Chinese and Japanese, conversion of zero-width spaces to the *roff \: equivalent, a fix for wrapping L<> inside S<>, and various other bug fixes.

Perhaps the most interesting is a fix to a long-standing problem with the Pod::Man output where bold and italic text would extend too far if used in combination with C<> fixed-width text. This bug has been around forever without being noticed, and then two different people noticed it while I was preparing this release.

You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the podlators distribution page. These changes should be incorporated into Perl core in due course, although given the substantial changes, that may require a baking period.