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.

This module desperately needs a test suite.  Pod::Parser comes with a
framework suitable for testing Pod::Text, but I haven't had the time to
pull it into this package or adopt it so that it can also test the other
modules.  Any contributions in this area would be *greatly* appreciated.

 * Do something about the other high-bit characters that aren't supported
   currently by Pod::Man.  Do some versions of groff support Unicode?
   We'd definitely need help from the *roff implementation here for a
   general solution.

 * Do something about high-bit characters directly in the text (including
   verbatim paragraphs) in Pod::Man.  Many versions of *roff choke on them
   badly unless we do the same sort of processing that we would if they
   were E<> escapes.

 * Make use of a more generic parsing layer above the translators that
   handles such things as command dispatch and tracking the nesting level
   of lists to cut down on the amount of code one has to repeat between
   translators.  The best line of division between a translator and a
   generic parsing layer is unclear.

 * 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.

 * Pod::Man is still blessing already-formatted strings to work around an
   old limitation in Pod::Parser.  We should be able to drop the bless and
   just use references to indicate an already-formatted string, but
   someone needs to track down what version of Pod::Parser in which that
   limitation was actually finally removed (there were several
   unsuccessful attempts at it) and require that version as a prereq
   before that can be done.

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.  (Tom Christiansen is
   currently using [FOOTNOTE: ...], but I think an interior sequence would
   be better; F<> is already taken, though.)  This is lower priority,
   since it's unclear how to do a footnote in text or *roff output anyway,
   but it's useful in other contexts.

 * Ideally, all of guesswork() in Pod::Man should be pulled up a level
   into a parsing layer that converts such things into E<> escapes (for
   stuff like long dashes) or interior sequences (for things like small
   caps).  It's unclear the best way to do this; some of the
   transformations are very specific to a translator.

 * Add a =verbatim command that outputs text exactly as it appears without
   any indentation or other changes.  (This is mostly useful inside a
   =begin/=end pair but may be useful elsewhere.)

 * Lots of people seem to think that translating POD into a canonical XML
   form and then generating output from that instead of directly from POD
   is a good idea.  Pod::Man and Pod::Text should actually be able to do
   that without too many major changes, since they already don't process
   POD directly but instead deal with the objects returned by Pod::Parser.
   No one seems to be actually working on this, though, and the concrete
   efforts that have been made in this direction have been met by almost
   complete silence.

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).

 * A better way to deal with the many L<> things in the SEE ALSO would be
   good.

 * Something ALLCAPS should be in small caps.  I [Tom] usually use
   \s-1ALLCAPS\s0 but \s-2ALLCAPS\s0 might be better.  (Pod::Man already
   does this.)

 * 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.
   (I don't believe Pod::Man currently handles this correctly.)

 * An area for further work is headers and footers.  You should include
   the module version number and the file's last modification date in
   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.
