NAME
    LaTeX::Pod - Transform LaTeX source files to POD (Plain old
    documentation)

SYNOPSIS
     use LaTeX::Pod;

     my $parser = LaTeX::Pod->new('/path/to/latex/source');
     print $parser->convert;

DESCRIPTION
    "LaTeX::Pod" converts LaTeX sources to Perl's POD (Plain old
    documentation) format. Currently only a subset of the available LaTeX
    language is suppported - see below for detailed information.

CONSTRUCTOR
  new
    The constructor requires that the path to the latex source must be
    declared:

     $parser = LaTeX::Pod->new('/path/to/latex/source');

    Returns the parser object.

METHODS
  convert
    There is only one public method available, "convert":

     $parser->convert;

    Returns the POD document as string.

SUPPORTED LANGUAGE SUBSET
    It's not much, but there's more to come:

    * chapters
    * sections/subsections/subsub...
    * verbatim blocks
    * itemized lists
    * plain text
    * bold/italic/code font tags
    * umlauts

IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS
    The current implementation is a bit *flaky* because "LaTeX::TOM", the
    framework being used for parsing the LaTeX nodes, makes a clear
    distinction between various types of nodes. As example, an \item
    directive has quite often a separate text which is associated with
    former one. And they can't be detected without some kind of
    sophisticated "lookbehind", which is what is done.

    The author tried to implement a *context-sensitive* awareness for
    "LaTeX::Pod". He did so by setting which node has been seen before the
    current one in order to be able to call the appropriate routine for a
    LaTeX directive with two or more nodes. Furthermore, "LaTeX::Pod"
    registers which node it has previously encountered and unregisters this
    information when it made use of it.

    Considering that the POD language has a limited subset of commands, the
    overhead of keeping track of node occurences seems almost bearable. The
    POD processed may consist of too many newlines before undergoing the
    scrubbing where leading and trailing newlines will be truncated.

SEE ALSO
    LaTeX::TOM

AUTHOR
    Steven Schubiger <schubiger@cpan.org>

LICENSE
    This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the same terms as Perl itself.

    See <http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html>

