At the risk of precipitating a Holy War, this sounds like an emacs configuration problem. Perhaps your friend should consult with an emacs-guru, or perhaps you can convince him, since he wants to edit the code, to just expand the contractions (it's => it is, don't => do not, etc) rather than move the POD around. It will, after all, be less error prone to add a few characters than to do wholesale cun'n'paste.