podlators v6.1.0 released

[email protected] (Russ Allbery) Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:43:30 -0700
Newsgroups perl.pod-people,perl.perl5.porters
Organization The Eyrie
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I'm pleased to announce release v6.1.0 of podlators.

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.

This release (unfortunately, given my awful timing in missing the new Perl
release) works around a fairly significant rendering bug in groff 1.24 and
later that people are otherwise likely to notice and be annoyed by.

Changes from previous release:

- groff 1.24.0 broke use of the .IP macro for tag list formatting by
  removing the mandatory spacing between the tag and the paragraph. Work
  around this by using .TP for lists other than bullet or numbered
  lists. Be aware that groff 1.24 and later defaults to a minimum gap of
  two spaces between the tag and the paragraph for .TP instead of one
  space as in previous pod2man and groff releases. POD documents that want
  an indent just wide enough for tags to format on the same line as the
  paragraph may need to increase the indent level for the =over command by
  one to render as desired with those versions of groff.

- Change the default fixed-width font from CW to CR. This avoids warnings
  with groff 1.24.0 or later at the cost of breaking troff output on
  Solaris 10. nroff output and troff output on Solaris 11 are
  unaffected. The pod2man option --fixed=CW will restore the previous
  behavior. Thanks to G. Branden Robinson for the analysis and assistance.
  (GitHub #43)

- Move the Pod::Man override of the AD string (needed to request left
  justification) after .TH, and also clear the HY register to request no
  hyphenation. This positioning also works with groff 1.23.0 and is
  required by groff 1.24.0 to disable hyphenation and use left
  justification by default without overriding user preferences. Many
  thanks to G. Branden Robinson for the discussion and assistance.

- Pod::Text now supports setting the encoding option to "none" to disable
  output encoding. This only makes sense when calling output_string() to
  direct the formatted output to a scalar. It is intended for special
  cases where the formatted output is held in memory for further
  processing and will encoded for output at a later step. Thanks to
  djerius for the suggestion. (GitHub #38)

- Fix Pod::Text quoting heuristics for C<> when the contents contains
  newlines. Thanks to van-de-bugger for the report. (GitHub #39)

- Suppress adding double quotes around C<> text in Pod::Man and Pod::Text
  if the contents are quoted with Unicode double quotes or consist of a
  single character followed by an ASCII double quote.

- Fix the documentation for the date and release options to Pod::Man and
  the corresponding --date and --release options to pod2man. The positions
  of the footers controlled by these options were reversed in podlators
  1.12 but the documentation was never updated.

- Update the Pod::Man discussion of intersentence spacing to reflect groff
  changes around double quotes and to recommend against attempting to
  manage the spacing for *roff output.

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.

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -- Russ Allbery, Just Another Perl Hacker
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