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Postings from November 2005
Now that I am no longer responsible for actually implementing Pod thingies, I feel free (existentially!) to make sage pronouncements and saucy suggestions. And here's one idea that recently occurred to me: I'm a not-very-sophisticated Emacs user, so I beg a thousand cyberpardons if my understanding of the problem space is wonky. But: Last I looked at emacs's Perl support, the only way to browse Pod from within emacs was either just to run a shell command to perldoc, or to call the smarter function cperl-perldoc. But cperl-perldoc (from cperl-mode.el, of course) simply passes off to calling pod2man (either directly or via perldoc and Man-getpage-in-background) with TERM set to "dumb". Of course, this produces just plaintext, with no fontification and with no hyperlinking of the the L<...> things. That makes me sad. I figure there's two different ways that someone with better emacs skills that I could make this work: * Have perldoc spit out the raw *roff code and then coax some part of woman.el into doing the formatting. (woman.el parses and formats *roff code right in emacs, instead of having *roff do it.) * Or completely avoid the whole detour thru nroff, and instead have perldoc use a different formatting class (via a -M switch) that would dumpthe parsed Pod as a big Lisp form. This could be easily produced by copying the short and sweet Pod::Simple::XMLOutStream and tweaking it to spit out Lisp instead (freely scavanging from as_Lisp_form in HTML::Element). Emacs could then just eval that Lisp form, and then accordingly produce a buffer with the text bits having appropriate formatting and also hyperlinks that work. I figure an experienced elisp superstah could do either of these on some well-caffeinated afternoon. If there are any within the sound of my voice: you know you want to do this! -- Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Thread Next