Spell(3pm)						User Contributed Perl Documentation						Spell(3pm)

NAME

       Pod::Spell -- a formatter for spellchecking Pod

SYNOPSIS

	 % podspell Thing.pm | ispell
	or if you don't have a podspell:
	 % perl -MPod::Spell -e "Pod::Spell->new->parse_from_file(shift)" Thing.pm |spell |fmt

	or:
	 % perl -MPod::Spell -e "Pod::Spell->new->parse_from_filehandle"
	 ...which takes POD on STDIN and sends formatted text to STDOUT

       ...or instead of piping to spell or ispell, use ">temp.txt", and open temp.txt in your word processor for spell-checking.

DESCRIPTION

       Pod::Spell is a Pod formatter whose output is good for spellchecking.  Pod::Spell rather like Pod::Text, except that it doesn't put much
       effort into actual formatting, and it suppresses things that look like Perl symbols or Perl jargon (so that your spellchecking program
       won't complain about mystery words like "$thing" or ""Foo::Bar"" or "hashref").

       This class provides no new public methods.  All methods of interest are inherited from Pod::Parser (which see).	The especially interesting
       ones are "parse_from_filehandle" (which without arguments takes from STDIN and sends to STDOUT) and "parse_from_file".  But you can proba-
       bly just make do with the examples in the synopsis though.

       This class works by filtering out words that look like Perl or any form of computerese (like "$thing" or ""N>7"" or
       ""@{$foo}{'bar','baz'}"", anything in C<...> or F<...> codes, anything in verbatim paragraphs (codeblocks), and anything in the stopword
       list.  The default stopword list for a document starts out from the stopword list defined by Pod::Wordlist, and can be supplemented (on a
       per-document basis) by having "=for stopwords" / "=for :stopwords" region(s) in a document.

ADDING STOPWORDS

       You can add stopwords on a per-document basis with "=for stopwords" / "=for :stopwords" regions, like so:

	 =for stopwords  plok Pringe zorch   snik !qux
	 foo bar baz quux quuux

       This adds every word in that paragraph after "stopwords" to the stopword list, effective for the rest of the document.  In such a list,
       words are whitespace-separated.	(The amount of whitespace doesn't matter, as long as there's no blank lines in the middle of the para-
       graph.)	Words beginning with "!" are deleted from the stopword list -- so "!qux" deletes "qux" from the stopword list, if it was in there
       in the first place.  Note that if a stopword is all-lowercase, then it means that it's okay in any case; but if the word has any capital
       letters, then it means that it's okay only with that case.  So a wordlist entry of "perl" would permit "perl", "Perl", and (less interest-
       ingly) "PERL", "pERL", "PerL", et cetera.  However, a wordlist entry of "Perl" catches only "Perl", not "perl".	So if you wanted to make
       sure you said only "Perl", never "perl", you could add this to the top of your document:

	 =for stopwords !perl Perl

       Then all instances of the word "Perl" would be weeded out of the Pod::Spell-formatted version of your document, but any instances of the
       word "perl" would be left in (unless they were in a C<...> or F<...> style).

       You can have several "=for stopwords" regions in your document.	You can even express them like so:

	 =begin stopwords

	 plok Pringe zorch

	 snik !qux

	 foo bar
	 baz quux quuux

	 =end stopwords

       If you want to use E<...> sequences in a "stopwords" region, you have to use ":stopwords", as here:

	 =for :stopwords
	 virtE<ugrave>

       ...meaning that you're adding a stopword of "virtu".  If you left the ":" out, that'd mean you were adding a stopword of "virtE<ugrave>"
       (with a literal E, a literal <, etc), which will have no effect, since  any occurrences of virtE<ugrave> don't look like a normal human-
       language word anyway, and so would be screened out before the stopword list is consulted anyway.

USING Pod::Spell
       My personal advice:

       o   Write your documentation in Pod.  Pod is described in perlpod.  And perlmodstyle has some advice on content.  This is the stage where
	   you want to make sure you say everything you should, have good and working examples, and have coherent grammar.

       o   Run it through podchecker.  This will report all sorts of problems with your Pod; you may choose to ignore some of these problems.
	   Some, like "*** WARNING: Unknown entity E<qacute>...", you should pay attention to.

       o   Once podchecker errors have been tended to, spellcheck the pod by running it through podspell / Pod::Spell.	For any misspellings that
	   are reported in the Pod::Spell-formatted text, fix them in the original.  Repeat until there's no complaints.

       o   Run it through podchecker again just for good measure.

SEE ALSO

       Pod::Wordlist

       Pod::Parser

       podchecker also known as Pod::Checker

       perlpod, perlpodspec

HINT

       If you feed output of Pod::Spell into your word processor and run a spell-check, make sure you're not also running a grammar-check --
       because Pod::Spell drops words that it thinks are Perl symbols, jargon, or stopwords, this means you'll have ungrammatical sentences, what
       with words being missing and all.  And you don't need a grammar checker to tell you that.

COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER

       Copyright (c) 2001 Sean M. Burke. All rights reserved.

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

       The programs and documentation in this dist are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but without any warranty; without even
       the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

AUTHOR

       Sean M. Burke "sburke@cpan.org"

perl v5.8.8							    2001-10-27								Spell(3pm)