It seems like you're uncomfortably mixing two different idioms here.

Perl's formats are designed to produce a simple formatted output on character devices (fixed-width, usually). These are used when the output device has no formatting capability of its own.

But you're mixing HTML with it. Unless you're using preformatted text of some sort (like using <PRE>) and trying to make it look right using spaces, the spaces that are generated by the Perl formatted output will mostly be ignored.

Wouldn't it be easier and cleaner (not to mention probably causing less network overhead) if you used HTML's own formatting capabilities to display this stuff as you want? Depending on your environment (intranet/Internet) you may consider using style sheets, which give quite a bit of flexibility for formatting.