One of the things that brian d foy worked pretty hard on for Perldoc inside of 5.16 was better UTF-8 support. We found that there are a huge number of variables for getting good Unicode support out of the "man" formatting pipeline. perldoc internally uses the "podulators" distribution to turn POD markup into man pages, HTML, XML, etc. But with the "man" formatting, the pipeline of operations looks something like this:

perldoc (a tiny little wrapper around the Pod::Perldoc module) finds the appropriate pod markup (either embedded in a .pm or a .pod), passes it to Pod::Man, takes th…