Linking between pods

[Irrelevant]

I'm trying to make a crossreference to one of the standard perl docs from within my POD, but I've been unable to fiddle pod2html into working. I'm using ActivePerl 5.8.3.

The link (one of many): L<are-a|perlobj/isa>

The first attempt:

pod2html.bat --infile=Mini.pm --outfile=Mini.html --css=file://C:/Programs/Perl/html/Active.css --header --verbose --podpath=C:/Programs/Perl/lib

and the error message:

C:\Programs\Perl\bin\pod2html.bat: error opening directory C: No such file or directory

The second attempt (with the "C:" dropped from --podpath),

pod2html.bat --infile=Mini.pm --outfile=Mini.html --css=file://C:/Programs/Perl/html/Active.css --header --verbose --podpath=/Programs/Perl/lib

did run without errors, but resulted in a link to file://programs/Perl/lib/Pod/perlobj.html#isa, which neither Firefox nor IE can resolve. Help!

[crashtest]

You're second attempt almost got it right. To fix your links, you need to specify the pod root as "/", because otherwise the program just uses the current directory (which is probably not "/").
From the usage information:
--podroot - filesystem base directory from which all relative paths in podpath stem (default is .).
So I think you want:

pod2html.bat --infile=Mini.pm --outfile=Mini.html --css=file:///Progra
+ms/Perl/html/Active.css --header --verbose --podroot="/" --podpath="P
+rograms/Perl/html"

You'll notice I modified your style sheet reference from file://C:/Programs/Perl/html/Active.css to file:///Programs/Perl/html/Active.css. That's what it took to get it to work for me. Hope this helps!
Updated to remove extraneous whitespace in command.

[Irrelevant]

With your version (removing the extraneous space in "-- podpath", pod2html runs successfully, but the link still does not work, and the browser also fails to find the CSS.

I suspect that pod2html may be expecting to be on a POSIX-style FS, so it requires absolute paths to start with "/". However, Windows browers apparently cannot evaluate absoulute paths with no drive letter. pod2html may only allow the CSS link to start with C:/ because it doesn't actually need to read the CSS, so allows anything.

[crashtest]

Have you tried the command above (minus the extra space!) with IE? That's all I had at work yesterday, and it looked fine.
I use Firefox at home as well though, and since nobody can be expected to make do with IE if given a choice, I fiddled some more with pod2html (following BrentDax suggestion with the "c|").
1.) To get the stylesheet to link correctly, try the following option (I'm assuming you installed your ActiveState Perl to C:\Programs\Perl):
--css="file://c|/Programs/Perl/html/Active.css"
2.) As for the links to perldocs, the "--htmlroot" option allows you to prepend what you need to the links. In combination with --podpath and --podroot, try:
--podroot="/" --podpath="Programs/Perl/html" --htmlroot="file://c|"

[BrentDax]

Starting the path with /c| may work.

[doom]

A couple of quick comments (that might not be relevant, because I don't know much about the Windows world these days):

(1) The old Tom Christiansen pod processing code is known to have some problems, but it's taking a *really* long time for a replacement to become accepted. I suggest taking a look at Pod::Simple::HtmlBatch. I posted a review here a while back: Pod::Simple::HtmlBatch.

(2) A gotcha that took me an embarassingly long time to figure out: Don't indent a list of L<> links. Indentation means "code block" in pod-land. (But it doesn't sound like this is your problem).

[Irrelevant]

#1 worked, thanks. HTMLBatch makes nicer output than pod2html, too.