Pod::Simple is a Perl library for parsing text in the Pod ("plain old documentation") markup language that is typically used for writing documentation for Perl and for Perl modules. The Pod format is explained in the perlpod man page; the most common formatter is called "perldoc". Pod formatters can use Pod::Simple to parse Pod documents into produce renderings of them in plain ASCII, in HTML, or in any number of other formats. Typically, such formatters will be subclasses of Pod::Simple, and so they will inherit its methods, like parse_file. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Pod-Simple/