It looks like Template Toolkit will be useful for the next stage in my process in which I officially present the data and the user doesn't need it in Word. Thanks for the tip. For this particular stage, I just need to create a rough draft and using 'format' statements will be sufficient (esp. since I've already written the code :-) So the question remains, how might I use \r to achieve embedded newlines that will be respected by '~~ $var' lines within a format statement?