Perl POD: line feed

Question

I use Pod to write manuals for my program. And I ran into a problem. Please tell me how to solve it.

I have the following code:

#include <myhead.h>
I<void> myfunc (I<int arg1>, I<int arg2>);

I would like the text to be written from the next line after the word 'void'. Moreover, it is with the next line, and not through one.

• Håkon Hægland: This looks like a C program. Are you using Perl to generate documentation for a C program?
• ogogon: Yes, I use pod2man and create manuals in several languages.

Answer 1

Pod is "plain ol' documentation" and doesn't have fancy features. It sounds like you want the text after void to be on the next line. In that case, you have to put that text on the next line and make it verbatim text so it retains the formatting:

=pod
 #include <myhead.h>
 I<void> 
 myfunc (I<int arg1>, I<int arg2>);
=cut

If you need something else, improve your questions by showing exactly what you expect.

But, I expect that you probably want to write your own Pod formatter. Then you can do exactly what you want. Fo what it's worth, I write all of my books in Pod and use several custom formatters to get them into their end states.

• ogogon: I suppose the "= pod" insertion is unnecessary - the file initially has a .pod extension and contains only man. If I write indented then format codes are not executed.

Answer 2

Pod has paragraph breaks and preformatted text, but no line breaks.

If you are targeting a particular output format, you can do, for example:

=begin html 
One line
Another line
=end html

Or you could do some kind of post-processing on the file.