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.