Re: How can one put a table into a pod

On 04/23/2011 09:58 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Karl Williamson<[email protected]>  writes:
>
>> It's worse than I thought.  I ran some experiments.  It appears that the
>> various formatters don't recognize 'text', and so there's no way to
>> specify a fall back.  Perhaps there is a 'text' formatter.  I don't know
>> what it would be.
>
> pod2text (Pod::Text).
>
> There have been many proposals over the years for a table representation
> in POD, but the general consensus has always been that tables are
> inherently complex enough that the result would be straying away from the
> "plain" in Plain Old Documentation.  Table markup in wikis is probably
> about as simple as one can get away with and still generate a useful
> table, and it's still pretty complex.  Tables are inherently hard to do
> properly, and there's an immediate demand for additional features (row
> spanning, column spanning, headings, etc.).
>
> I don't object to supporting it in Pod::Text and Pod::Man, but I'd have to
> ask someone else to write the initial implementation.  I think support in
> Pod::Man at least would be fairly important before deciding to add tables
> to Perl's core documentation, but the research on how to use tbl properly
> is more than I currently have time for.
>

I used to be considered a [nt]roff guru.  I would still rather use it 
than MS Word, but I find the Linux implementations lacking, and actually 
don't have much need to write documents.  Anyway, I could easily write 
the Pod::Man part (famous last words); but I don't know how widespread 
tbl is, or its quality on Linux.  I imagine the nroff output of tbl 
could be used for Pod::Text, again spoken with no investigation.