There is a lot of code reuse going on here. Thats a good thing, though it may not seem like it to you at the moment. I think you just need to install HTML::Tagset, HTML::Parser, and then HTML::Tree to get HTML::FormatText working ok. Persevere, it's not that much farther to go.

Hmm. HTML::Parser is XS, but I don't see it in the Activestate repositories. But it is such a commonly used module, I must have something set up wrong in my (almost never used) ActivePerl.