NAME

snopea - A little ``Plain Old Documentation'' format for SNOBOL4

DESCRIPTION

snopea is a simple-to-use markup language used for writing documentation for SNOBOL4, SNOBOL4 programs, and SNOBOL4 modules, inspired by perlpod(1). The snopea(1) command translates snopea to *roff man(7) macro format or HTML.

A line that starts with zero or more star/asterisk (*) characters followed by =pea signals start of a block of documentation. All lines until a =cut directive will be processed after removal of leading star/asterisk characters.

New paragraphs are started with a blank line.

FORMATTING

B<text>: text is formatted in bold.
I<text>: text is formatted in italic.
C<text>: text is formatted in constant width.
L<url>: url is formatted as an HTML link.

DIRECTIVES

=break: Inserts a line break.
=bull text: Indicates a bullet item in a list.
=code: Starts a block of code, lines will be formatted in a constant-width font, and line breaks will be preserved.
=cut: Signals end of a block of documentation.
=ecode: Ends a =code block.
=etable: Ends a table.
=item label: A list item with tag label.
=indent number: Controls the indentation of =item paragraphs.
=nitem text: A numbered list item with tag label.
=row columns: A table row. columns is a tab separated list.
=sect name: Declares man page section name.
=subsect name: Declares man page subsection name.
=table tab stops: Begin a table, setting tab stops, a sequence of positions in inches, each followed by i (ie; 1i 2i 3i)

SPECIAL CHARACTERS

The following sequences (an unholy mix of troff(1) and HTML) MUST be used for portable formatting:

``: left double quote (``)
´´: right double quote ('')
&: ampersand (&)
π: greek lower-case pi (π)
<: less than sign (<)
>: greater than sign (>)
\e: backslash (\)
\`: accent grave (`)
\': apostrophe (')
\-: en-dash
\&: zero-width space
\|: thin space
\~: non-breaking space
\=: equals-sign

NOT CONFORMING TO

Inspired by (but not compatible with) Perl POD format. https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpodspec.html

AUTHOR

Philip L. Budne