However, I think that this could be classified as a bug or at least a somewhat valid intent to add a new feature for escaping capabilities to Pod::Simple.

I think Pod::Simple is pretty complex (see e.g. Pod::Simple::BlackBox), I'm not sure if changes like that are easy to implement and test, especially given the huge amount of POD out in the wild. An argument could also be made that perlpodspec is simply missing a more clear statement of "don't break the link part of L<> across lines"...

That would require a parser that is sophisticated enough to detect sentences ... and that, frankly, is probably too much to ask for. Instead, I could format my POD directly in a groff-recommended way, which generally shouldn't have any negative impact on other POD renderers.

Yes, I agree, and if you don't mind formatting your POD in a *roff-friendly way (POD is a pretty old format) then that's probably the best solution. (Update: Personally, I wouldn't put in the effort to do this, because I don't use man to read Perl docs, I always use perldoc, which doesn't do the double space after sentences. But if you don't mind doing this, then the nice thing about it is your docs will look consistent no matter if read via man, perldoc, or HTML.)

OT: what's the proper way to quote on PerlMonks? Just copying the text loses all formatting

I often re-add formatting by hand, but you could also access the XML version via the link at the top of the page under the title to get to the original markup.

[apc://] seems to be broken

Yeah, that one seems to be outdated. A hyperlink to GitHub is probably best nowadays, hopefully that repository won't change so soon (the renaming of the repo on perl5.git.perl.org unfortunately broke a bunch of my links that I need to go back and fix sometime...).

In reply to Re^3: Escape newlines in POD / (Selectively) don't generate space characters instead by haukex
in thread Escape newlines in POD / (Selectively) don't generate space characters instead by Ionic

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