Thanks. I have bookmarked that.

Edit: Tried it. Quite satisfactory really.

Argh! Section linking works somehow different than pod2html: Some unwanted quotes are added and items have no NAME anchors like headings to link them.

The lack of =item <a name/>s has bothered me for a long time. I see quite a few authors moving toward using head2 for all their methods/functions to get around it. :(

I did look at podchecker but I could not see what help it would provide with the somewhat subjective formatting issues I came across. If you want to know what I am talking about compare the two versions of CGI::Application::Plugin::PageLookup (Database section).

I am surprised that CPAN/PAUSE doesn't seem to have a preview facility to check that the pod looks okay on the internet.

If you ever uploaded something to PAUSE, you would have noticed that distributions aren't processed instantly. Instead, there's a batchjob running in the background processing recent uploads. Being able to "preview" pods means processing distributions needs to be done real time. Which would require more resources server side, as suddenly one has to scale against peak loads, instead of being able to average the processing time.

Considering the limited advantage (IMO, close to nill) of doing the processing real time, I'm not surprised noone has donated the hardware (and time to change the software) to enable this.

But you can always talk to Andreas about donating hardware and time.

I am aware that it is a batch process and I was not suggesting that be changed. I think the reason it needs to be a batch process is so that integrity checking on version numbers and permissions can be done. A preview service could be much simpler perhaps taking indidual .pm files or a large textbox and ignoring integrity checks. I can understand the issue with extra resources. I could provide such a service myself if I get a clear idea of what the code would be. On my last reading of this thread the jury seemed to be out on that.

I've just noticed that CPAN's docs don't include target anchors on =item commands as on =headN commands, just like using Pod::Simple::HTML, and cannot be linked. Was this intended or is a bug?

Reference: "A section is started by the named heading or item." (perlpod)

As pod2html does include the target on items, I used them to link within a pod, but it seems that I should remove that links as them would point to nowhere when uploaded to CPAN.

A bit late to the game but I just happened to stumble over this a second ago and remembered seeing this thread so... Pod::ProjectDocs - generates CPAN like pod pages.