Wow, you researched that well enough to have found my previous struggles with it. I went away from rtf before, but this time I thought I'd try it, getting farther in a day than expected. Caller and callee look like this now:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use 5.010;
use lib "template_stuff";
use steps1;

say "enter basename for file";
my $word = <>;
chomp $word;

# main data structure
my %vars = (
  fears  => 'fears2.txt',
  causes => 'causes2.txt',
  width   => 50,
  word  => $word .'.rtf',
);
my $rvars  = \%vars;
my $return = pop_texts( $rvars );
say "returned was \n $$return";
my $return2 = format_texts( $rvars, $return );
__END__

[download]
sub format_texts {
  use strict;
  use 5.010;
  use RTF::Writer;

  my ( $rvars, $reftext1 ) = @_;
  my %vars  = %$rvars;
  my $text1 = $$reftext1;

  my $rtf = RTF::Writer->new_to_file( $vars{word} );
  $rtf->prolog( 'title' => "List of fears" );
  $rtf->number_pages;
  $rtf->print($text1);
  $rtf->close;

  return 1;
}

[download]

Surprisingly, the rtf file printed out beautifully on windows, albeit without prolog, numbering, and with default margins. This will suffice for me to read it to someone else, so it is good enough for now. RTF Cookbook on CPAN is one of the better resources out there. What puzzles me specifically is how to brook the chasm between the method calls of RTF::Writer and the mark-up language itself. To blurt it out:

Q1) Where do I put the backslash sequences to create a right margin of 4000 twips?

Thanks for your comments and attention to detail.

In reply to Re^2: combining lists, formatting and printing on windows by Aldebaran
in thread combining lists, formatting and printing on windows by Aldebaran

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