G'day miguelnixon.
Welcome to the Monastery.
"... forgive me if this is the wrong forum ..."
No need to seek forgiveness.
Feel free to ask any Perl-related questions here.
And please don't be dissuaded by thinking you should already know something:
I, with apparently more than five years of Perl under my belt than you, asked a
perldoc-related question just last week.
I suspect the differences you're seeing are OS-related, not Perl-related.
There may be some configuration (or similar) setting you need to change such that "heading."
becomes an equivalent with formatting code like ".[1m.[1mheading.[0m.[0m.".
Just to mention some earlier (chronologically) points regarding environment variables:
$ env | grep PAGE
PAGER=/usr/bin/less
I do recall using additional options with less years ago when running macOS
(aka Mac OS X in earlier versions) but that appears unnecessary with the current OS.
I don't have your OS/Perl combination available.
This makes testing your specification installations impossible for me; however, general test scenarios are valid for us both.
I do have Perl 5.30 on Cygwin (but nothing as early as 5.22).
The following reflects my tests with 5.30
(I repeated these with 5.34 — my usual and latest, currently stable version — but saw no differences).
I wrote pm_11136178_pod_formatting.pod:
=encoding utf8
=head1 Emphases
=over 4
=item * Plain
perldoc Bold, Italic etc
=item * Bold
B<perldoc Bold, Italic etc>
=item * Italic
I<perldoc Bold, Italic etc>
=item * Bold Italic
B<< I<perldoc Bold, Italic etc> >>
=item * Italic Bold
I<< B<perldoc Bold, Italic etc> >>
=item * Bold Italic Code
B<<< I<< C<perldoc Bold, Italic etc> >> >>>
=item * Italic Bold Code
I<<< B<< C<perldoc Bold, Italic etc> >> >>>
=back
=cut
Running that through perldoc I get:
Emphases
* Plain
perldoc Bold, Italic etc
* Bold
perldoc Bold, Italic etc
* Italic
*perldoc Bold, Italic etc*
* Bold Italic
*perldoc Bold, Italic etc*
* Italic Bold
*perldoc Bold, Italic etc*
* Bold Italic Code
*"perldoc Bold, Italic etc"*
* Italic Bold Code
*"perldoc Bold, Italic etc"*
I do note various asterisks and double-quotes to represent emphasis and monospace text;
however, there's nothing to differentiate italicised and emboldened text.
Did you see something different between 5.22 and 5.30.
Piping the perldoc output through hexdump:
$ perldoc pm_11136178_pod_formatting.pod | hexdump -C
00000000 45 6d 70 68 61 73 65 73 0a 20 20 20 20 2a 20 20 |Emphases.
+ * |
00000010 20 50 6c 61 69 6e 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 | Plain..
+ |
00000020 70 65 72 6c 64 6f 63 20 42 6f 6c 64 2c 20 49 74 |perldoc B
+old, It|
00000030 61 6c 69 63 20 65 74 63 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 2a 20 |alic etc.
+. * |
00000040 20 20 42 6f 6c 64 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 | Bold..
+ |
00000050 70 65 72 6c 64 6f 63 20 42 6f 6c 64 2c 20 49 74 |perldoc B
+old, It|
00000060 61 6c 69 63 20 65 74 63 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 2a 20 |alic etc.
+. * |
00000070 20 20 49 74 61 6c 69 63 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 | Italic.
+. |
00000080 20 20 2a 70 65 72 6c 64 6f 63 20 42 6f 6c 64 2c | *perldo
+c Bold,|
00000090 20 49 74 61 6c 69 63 20 65 74 63 2a 0a 0a 20 20 | Italic e
+tc*.. |
000000a0 20 20 2a 20 20 20 42 6f 6c 64 20 49 74 61 6c 69 | * Bol
+d Itali|
000000b0 63 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 2a 70 65 72 6c |c..
+ *perl|
000000c0 64 6f 63 20 42 6f 6c 64 2c 20 49 74 61 6c 69 63 |doc Bold,
+ Italic|
000000d0 20 65 74 63 2a 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 2a 20 20 20 49 | etc*..
+ * I|
000000e0 74 61 6c 69 63 20 42 6f 6c 64 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 |talic Bol
+d.. |
000000f0 20 20 20 20 2a 70 65 72 6c 64 6f 63 20 42 6f 6c | *perl
+doc Bol|
00000100 64 2c 20 49 74 61 6c 69 63 20 65 74 63 2a 0a 0a |d, Italic
+ etc*..|
00000110 20 20 20 20 2a 20 20 20 42 6f 6c 64 20 49 74 61 | * B
+old Ita|
00000120 6c 69 63 20 43 6f 64 65 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 |lic Code.
+. |
00000130 20 20 2a 22 70 65 72 6c 64 6f 63 20 42 6f 6c 64 | *"perld
+oc Bold|
00000140 2c 20 49 74 61 6c 69 63 20 65 74 63 22 2a 0a 0a |, Italic
+etc"*..|
00000150 20 20 20 20 2a 20 20 20 49 74 61 6c 69 63 20 42 | * I
+talic B|
00000160 6f 6c 64 20 43 6f 64 65 0a 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 |old Code.
+. |
00000170 20 20 2a 22 70 65 72 6c 64 6f 63 20 42 6f 6c 64 | *"perld
+oc Bold|
00000180 2c 20 49 74 61 6c 69 63 20 65 74 63 22 2a 0a 0a |, Italic
+etc"*..|
That looks a lot like your 5.22 ouput.
In case you were wondering, Cygwin does support highlighting codes.
I can't tell how they might differ.
Here's an example:
$ echo $PS1
\[\e]0;\w\a\]\n\[\e[32m\]\u@\h \[\e[33m\]\w\[\e[0m\]\n\$
I would investigate the OS versions differences first.
Some monks may even have exactly the same combinations of OS and Perl as you; that may help more than I've been able.
If you do find that it's an OS issue; please post here for the benefit of others.
P. S. (forgot to mention):
I generated HTML output via:
pod2html --infile=pm_11136178_pod_formatting.pod --outfile=pm_11136178
+_pod_formatting.html
When viewed in Firefox the output was exactly as expected.
All formatting codes had been correctly translated to the equivalent HTML tags.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.