Your question is really too broad to answer effectively. As has been previously mentioned, programs like MSWord (or OpenOffice) create and manage 'documents'. 'documents' can be quite complex, including tables, graphs, diagrams, headers/footers, sub/superscripts, etc, etc, etc...
You have a couple of options here. Both MSWord and OpenOffice allow you to save documents as web pages. This often includes the caveat that 'some formatting may be lost'. It will then depend on just how complicated you want to allow displayed documents to be. Also, both aforementioned programs support saving to RTF, and there is a CPAN module for processing RTF files. You could probably set up your 'upload' page the ability to choose either an html page, an RTF file, or a plain-text file for processing, if you want to be broad.

In reply to Re: Displaying text files with perl. by Illuminatus
in thread Displaying text files with perl. by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.