I agree with you that the way these paths are defined, is unclean. In general, for use in perl alone, I'd agree with your conclusion: to use forward slashes. However, this is not just perl: the paths are passed as parameters via OLE to Word. I cannot test my hyphotesis, but I seriously doubt whether Word would accept paths with forward slashes. From what I remember with my experience with OLE and Excel, a program from the same stable as Word, is that it was extremely unhappy about forward slashes in file paths: it only accepted backslashes as a valid directory separator.

Conclusion: using backslashes in the paths is more than justified here. However, the way they're used in writing down these strings, is still unclean.