So unfortunately, you will be constrained to processor specific =for directives or ascii style tables in a verbatim block.

On CPAN eryq uses ascii table like this:

   Use encoding:     | If your message contains:
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   7bit              | Only 7-bit text, all lines <1000 characters
   8bit              | 8-bit text, all lines <1000 characters
   quoted-printable  | 8-bit text or long lines (more reliable than "8
+bit")
   base64            | Largely non-textual data: a GIF, a tar file, et
+c.
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Which are then converted to Html tables like this using a modified pod2html tool.

--
John.

Okay,thanks for the ideas. I realise that the Pod spec doesn't include tables, but figured it might be a common enough problem that someone might have written a way to achieve them. Was wondering if there was anything obvious available, but there doesn't seem to be. No problem - I'll write a quick perl script myself to pre-process the pod file and extract any tables (written in some XML flavour), parse them, and then reinsert them into the pod doc as a =for block in the output format I'm looking for (html, latex, or plaintext, at present).

Thanks for your time Eric

Well, maybe not a good way, but a way:

=pod 

This is my table:

 Item   Description
 -----  -----------
 this   This is it.
 that   This is that.

=cut
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The initial space says to just format what follows verbatim.

Yes, that's the method I'm using to get round it for the moment. Unfortunately I think I may need something more fancy at a later date...

If you need anything fancy, use something else instead of POD. POD, afterall, stands for Plain Old Documentation. PODs simplicity is a feature.

Abigail

I don't remember if I actually wrote Pod::Table, but I did write a spec (should be easy enough to implement).

http://crazyinsomniac.perlmonk.org/perl/misc/table.pod