My comments:

• While valid perl, it's not really best to have @array = "scalar".
• You're storing stuff in @gcard that you can generate from the information in @text
• @text, @gcard, and @pcard, $ntext, etc. aren't very descriptive variable names
• You mention reading the input file into an array. It looks to me from what you've posted that you don't need to read the input into an array, but rather generate a data structure from the processed input. e.g., build a hash for each of your n01 lines where the keys are like "chocolate" and the values are whatever you've represented by "x" in your code.

I know you said you weren't looking for solutions but here's a different way of doing essentially the same thing that will hopefully give you some clues:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my (@header,%data);
while (<DATA>) {
   if (/^n10/) { push @header, 'total'; }       # will it always be to
+tal?
   elsif (/^n01([^;]+);/) { push @header, $1; $data{$1} = "x"; }
   print;
}

$data{'total'} = "x";  # maybe compute a sum here instead :)

print join(' ', "g", @header), "\n";
print join(' ', "g", map { '-' x length($_) } @header), "\n";
print join(' ', "p", map { sprintf("%*s ", length($_)-1, $data{$_}) } 
+@header), 
"\n";

__DATA__
line1
line2
n10total
n01chocoloate;more stuff
n01vanilla;more stuff
[download]

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