README.5.004 ============ Converting pod documents for perl 5.004 - Michal Jagermann (michal@ellpspace.math.ualberta.ca), 1997/05/28. This conversion follows similar jobs done for earlier versions of Perl by Krishna Sethuraman (krishna@mit.edu) and Nick Gianniotis (nico@acm.org). Its main purpose is to provide Perl documentation in a format convenient to use from emacs (info). In particular these files are very desirable in a conjunction with 'cperl' emacs mode as you can get an immediate help for any documented Perl function. If you want a hard copy you will likely fare much better with pod2latex program distributed with Perl sources. Documents converted are all pods from main pod directory; no module docs. This should be enough as it makes for thirty four info files. :-) A converter used is modified from an original pod2texinfo.pl without trying to untangle its intricacies. Some parts of it were made a bit more careful and some jobs were moved "outside". If you would like to do conversions yourself start with peeking into a provided Makefile. As originally a "cleanup" of resulting texinfo files is required. In particular all tabs were expanded, some '@table' requests were replaced with '@ftable' and '@vtable' and '@kindex' entries were added to perldiag.texi (Texinfo does not supply '@ktable' anymore). Pay also attention to a few "false @enumerate" - there are instances of '=item' followed by a digit where this is really NOT intended. You will also find that a part of 'perltoc' which describe a contents of modules pods is commented out with '@ignore'. Resulting '.texi' files were made into '.info' files with a help of 'makeinfo' program. Some concerns mentioned in README do not seem to be valid any longer but possibly some other are. Generated '.texi' file are sufficient for 'makeinfo' but not good enough for TeX to accept and some further effort would be needed if you would think that you need that. It does not seem to much point as hardcopy can be easily generated from pod2man created manpages. If you want to try conversions yourself then you will copies (or links) of core pod files from a Perl distribution. They are not supplied here. Things are big enough as they are. :-) If somebody feels compelled to do a similar jobs for module pods - be my guest! --mj