I agree that the ultimate appearance depends on the renderer.
I think I just stumbled upon further proof of this. I happened to be looking at the xml_merge script on CPAN, and the OPTIONS section in my web browser looks quite different from what I see at my linux command prompt when I use:
perldoc xml_merge
which resolves to:
pod2man --lax xml_merge | nroff -man
Here is a snippet of the xml_merge POD:
And, yes, I am tossing the term 'POD' around rather loosely. |