I'd rather start with LaTeX in that case - it is very human writable, though not as human readable as POD, and allows far more more control over layout than POD (optionally; you can let the LaTeX compiler figure out as much or as little by itself as you want). The pod2latex output is likely to be far more convoluted than a human written document.

If you've never used LaTeX before, you should give it a spin - it is pure joy to write a couple lines of markup and get a gorgeously typeset document, esp compared to monkeying with "word processors" or even "office suites". Plus you can write the document in vi (and nicely syntax highlighted by vim), instead of wrestling a large GUI program that lacks a decent editor but eats oodles of RAM for all the pretty buttons. And then the results don't even look nearly as slick - the styles LaTeX comes with produce professional quality layouts.

Makeshifts last the longest.

I second the recommendation for LaTeX. The output is very professional. With pod2latex, you can easily pull in bits of a larger document directly from the perl modules which holds the original source of some material.

Coupled with the power of perl, you can easily pull in material from other sources (database, spreadsheets, variously formatted text files, etc.) and feed everything into a nicely formatted document that you can turn into great looking postscript or PDF document.

I just finished a document introducing the DBI here at work, and it's written in LaTeX as well. I wouldn't be able to tell POD it should not break examples over pagebreaks. In LaTeX, I just make floating figures out of example programs and have LaTeX figure out the ideal placement. LaTeX automatically makes an index and a title page as well, and allows me to include pictures I've made with xfig. The document I made has nothing fancy, but it does use the three points I just made.

Abigail