Badly formatted source code is ugly. But, a few keyboard macros later and it's much nicer.
And this little defun helped a lot, maybe someone will find it as useful as I did.
(defun jpl-makeover-remove-pod-sub-whitespace ()
"Clean up Perl source whitespace formatting"
(interactive)
(save-excursion
;; Remove =cut with more POD as the next thing
(replace-regexp "=cut\n\n+=" "\n\n=" nil (point-min) (point-max))
;; Remove whitespace between POD and sub
(replace-regexp "=cut\n+sub " "=cut\nsub " nil (point-min) (point-max))
;; 3 newlines before subs if no POD
(replace-regexp "\n\n+sub " "\n\n\n\nsub " nil (point-min) (point-max))
;; 3 newlines before =head...
(replace-regexp "\n\n+=head" "\n\n\n\n=head" nil (point-min) (point-max))
;; ...except at the top POD block where it's more compact
(replace-regexp "\n\n+=head1 NAME" "\n=head1 NAME" nil (point-min) (point-max))
(replace-regexp "\n\n+=head1 DESCRIPTION" "\n\n=head1 DESCRIPTION" nil (point-min) (point-max))
(replace-regexp "\n\n+=head1 SYNOPSIS" "\n\n=head1 SYNOPSIS" nil (point-min) (point-max))
)
(font-lock-fontify-buffer) ;; In case it got confused
)
