perldoc and Pod::Man

[Russ Allbery]

Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:

> it was nice to meet you at DebConf.

Yes, likewise!

> As you may recall, we talked briefly about this Pod-Perldoc change:

> 3.20 - Sat Apr 27 05:25:30 UTC 2013
>     * Make default formatter "ToTerm" instead of "ToMan" for
>       better UTF-8 support

> and your opinion AIUI was that ToMan with the Pod::Man utf8 switch
> would be a better choice.

> I looked a bit into this, and some background is at

>  https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=77465

> where people with older groffs and the like reported quite a few problems
> which were eventually resolved by switching to ToTerm.

> So it seems we're at an impasse. Please let me know if you have
> ideas on improvement. 

Ah, that's unfortunate.  I was really hoping that groff was farther along
than that, but it sounds like it's not.  I do suspect that generating
UTF-8 man pages that are stored on disk in the man path will go better
than trying to generate them and pass them through groff on the fly (at
least I'm hopeful it will, since I still plan on doing that in the next
release), but now I understand more why the choice of ToTerm was made.

I'm somewhat surprised that upstream didn't switch to
Pod::Text::Overstrike instead.  This should work without any special flags
to less, since it has special code for handling this output format (it was
the default output format from man for many years), and should come close
to the same formatting quality that Pod::Text::Termcap can produce.  I
wonder if that would produce good output across all the various platforms.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>