Re: How can one put a table into a pod

Karl Williamson <[email protected]> writes:

> 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.

tbl is comfortably universal at this point on any system that uses *roff,
I think.  I'm not worried about that.  Avoiding any GNU-specific features
may be a bit harder, but hopefully not too hard.  If you know how to write
it, that would be great.

> I imagine the nroff output of tbl could be used for Pod::Text, again
> spoken with no investigation.

Pod::Text unfortunately can't rely on tbl or nroff to do rendering, since
Pod::Text is designed to convert POD anywhere to something that's
immediately readable.  Its intention is to be the lowest common
denominator output that works on Windows, VMS, etc.  The best way to deal
with it may be to use a markup for tables that's sufficiently readable
that Pod::Text can just dump the markup into the output, at least to start
with.  If someone feels energetic, they could then improve that.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>