podlators To-Do List

This is a somewhat random and unordered list of things I'd like to see
fixed or improved, but which I've not yet had a chance to do.  Patches for
any of the following are very much welcome.

 * Revisit the handling of non-ASCII characters.  At this point, it
   probably makes sense to output UTF-8 by default, which also eliminates
   all of the frustrations in Pod::Man with turning valid characters into
   X and would allow massive simplification of the preamble for most
   pages.  We could also move some of the remaining *roff macros to the
   accents section and only conditionally output them.  Unfortunately, it
   looks like all non-man-db, non-groff *roff implementations still don't
   support Unicode characters, though, and even some groff setups may not
   support them properly.  So this is still a portability issue.

 * Support an output mode that uses groff escapes for all Unicode
   characters.  We might be able to just use \[uNNNN] for all Unicode
   code points.  This would work portably on any system that uses groff,
   and may make sense as the default output format on Linux.

 * Escape all hyphens in the text of L<some-command> links.

 * Add a =for license stanza that takes license text and embeds it as a
   *roff comment.

 * Abstract the shared code between Pod::Man and Pod::Text to a new
   Pod::Simple inheritance layer that both modules can use.

 * Suppress the URL for L<|> if the link is just the anchor part of the
   tag with mailto: added to the front.  Also strip the mailto: part if
   there is no anchor text.

 * Add a test suite for the pod2man and pod2text driver programs.

 * There should be some way to turn off all heuristics when people are
   using POD for some purpose other than Perl or some other programming
   language with similar needs.  The hooks are there in the code but we
   need an interface to set or unset them.

 * The test suite is still fairly basic, and doesn't test all of the
   options to the various modules, the scripts, =over/=back, or the
   guesswork in Pod::Man.  The best way forward would be to add coverage
   testing and then aim for 100% coverage.  That won't guarantee
   everything is tested, but it will be much closer.

 * Pod::Text::Termcap can leave underlining turned on across a newline,
   resulting in weird visual artifacts.  Ideally, underlining should be
   turned off at the end of each line, if still on, and then turned back
   on at the start of the subsequent line.

 * Update coding style to my current standards.

 * Abstract the commonalities between the various test programs into a
   generic driver for testing POD formatters, and then use it to handle
   all of the test cases.  (This is mostly done, but the Pod::Text tests
   still have to be converted.)

 * Document all the standard module interfaces from Pod::Simple.

 * Optionally suppress the generation of empty man pages in Pod::Man.

The following items require changes to the POD specification and are
therefore of broader scope than just this code:

 * Introduce a new interior sequence for metasyntactic variables, probably
   M<>, and reserve I<> exclusively for emphasis.  This resolves a
   significant ambiguity in the current POD specification in a way that
   would make the Pod::Text output much better.  (Metasyntactic variables
   should be surrounded in angle brackets and emphasized text should be
   surrounded by asterisks.)

 * Introduce a new interior sequence for footnotes.  There has been
   extensive discussion of this on pod-people@perl.org.  One proposal is
   to use a new formatting code for footnotes, probably N<>, and just
   in-line the footnote as part of the interior sequence.  This doesn't
   allow multi-paragraph footnotes, however, so a second proposal is to
   have the content of the N<> formatting code be a unique marker that
   matches an =item tag in a new =begin footnotes section processed by
   translators that know how to do footnotes.  (The translator should
   probably number the footnotes and insert some sort of numerical marker
   into the text at the point of the footnote.)  This would require
   translators to formatting languages that do something more interesting
   with footnotes to parse the entire document, extract the footnote
   section, and then stick the footnotes back into the main text at the
   point where they occur, however.

   There are some preliminary patches for Pod::Man and Pod::Text in NOTES.
   It's possible to do footnotes directly in *roff (it's section T4 of the
   troff paper), but that relies on header and footer triggers and for
   terminal display it's becoming common to suppress the headers and
   footers.  For the purposes of Pod::Man, end notes are probably a better
   model and can be handled about the same way as they are for Pod::Text.

The following ideas about guesswork and heuristics were all taken from a
post by Tom Christiansen to pod-people@perl.org:

 * All of the following should be okay to use verbatim in any POD text and
   have the translator do something appropriate:

   FILEHANDLE PackageName
   $variable @variable %variable &function
   $var::iable @vari::able %variab::le &functio::n
   function() fun::ction() fun::ct::ion()
   manpage(3r)
   user@host.com
   http://somewhere.com/stuff/ ftp://somewhere.com/stuff/

   Pod::Man and Pod::Text handle much of this already, but not all of it
   (and I've not checked to see exactly where they break).

 * Something in __ALLCAPS__ should be in code font but perhaps not small,
   and maybe some magic between the unders, as in \f(CW_\|_ALLCAPS_\|_\fP.
   (Pod::Man handles the spaces between the underbars, but not putting
   this into code font.)

 * The module version number should be included in the headers/footers
   where appropriate.  That means that, when processing a module, ideally
   one wants to pull out the module's $VERSION to use in the footer rather
   than Perl's version.