POD questions

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi!

I'd like to create HTML documentation from a Perl module with POD in the "CPAN style" or similar. pod2html creates only black on white. Even with "pod2html --css style.css" (style.css from cpan.org) the result is not very nice.

Another question: I noticed, that POD is very limited to create documentation if you want to document a Perl Module with more than one package/class in it:

If you use "=head3 new" to document constructors and there are more than one, the HTML file which pod2html generates has problems with links. There are more than one <a name="new"> in it and you have to use "=head3 Class::new" or similar.

Is there a better POD to HTML parser than pod2html or is there a better code documenting system for Perl than POD?

Thanks,
Thomas

Comment on POD questions

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: POD questions by Juerd (Abbot) on Apr 06, 2003 at 18:37 UTC
Is there a better POD to HTML parser than pod2html Have a look at Pod::Simple. Juerd - http://juerd.nl/ - spamcollector_perlmonks@juerd.nl (do not use).	[reply]
Re: POD questions by The Mad Hatter (Priest) on Apr 06, 2003 at 18:40 UTC
I believe CPAN uses a custom pod2html generator or something similar. If you manually tweak the output of `pod2html --css style.css` to put the body text in class `pod` and the table of contents in class `toc` it should turn out better. You could also tweak the CSS instead if you wanted to. For some reason, pod2html uses multiple `pre` tags for code examples, which causes it to look funny using the CPAN styles. If you make the code sections wrapped in only one `pre` tag, it should look like it does on CPAN. Hope this helps.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: POD questions by omnibus (Scribe) on Apr 07, 2003 at 15:27 UTC
Pdoc (available from SourceForge, not from CPAN) might be just what you're looking for. It uses standard POD markup to generate Javadoc-like documentation pages. Take a look at the BioPerl documentation at http://doc.bioperl.org/releases/bioperl-1.2/ for an example of the output that it generates.	[reply]