view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

Cow.pm  view on Meta::CPAN

=head1 WRITING YOUR OWN COW FILES

First, get comfortable with C<Text::Template> and its capabilities.

{$balloon} is the text balloon; it should be on a line by itself,
flush-left.  {$tl} and {$tr} are what goes to the text balloon from
the thinking/speaking part of the picture; {$tl} is a backslash
("\") for speech, while {$tr} is a slash ("/"); both are a lowercase
letter O ("o") for thought.  {$el} is a left eye, and {$er} is a
right eye; both are "o" by default.  Finally {$U} is a tongue,
because a capital U looks like a tongue.  (Its default value is "U ".) 
Escape all other curly-braces within the ASCII art with backslashes.

There are two methods to make your own cow file: the standalone
file and the Perl module.

For the standalone file, take your piece of ASCII art and modify
it according to the C<Text::Template> rules above.  Note that the
balloon must be flush-left in the template if you choose this method.
If the balloon isn't meant to be flush-left in the final output,
use its C<over()> method.