While Perl is a very good tool for these types of jobs I wonder if in this case VB macros aren't more suitable. I should think that by interacting with Word's Object model you could get the Word engine itself to do many of these tasks. Having said that if you do go Perl I would probably end up converting the word files into a more suitable text only form (word documents are actually binary objects with lots of stuff in them) and then work there.

Possibly a hybrid approach would be to make a macro in VB that automatically extracts each chapter to a text file, and then you could have a perl script that operated on the result. There are also options of interfacing with Word COM interface from Perl as well, but until I was familiar with doing it in VB i wouldnt bother, the whole VBA editor/design process can be quite illuminating as to how the Object model works with reasonably good documentation and support like a visual debugger and automatic method/property selection. Making macros and then studying the generated code is a good way to learn. Once you have working VB code its not too diffuclt to translate it to Perl via the Win32 modules.

Altogether I imagine the difficulty will be dependent on how automated you want the process to be. If you simply save the documents as text and then have a script that does various jobs like you decribe you avoid a lot of the complexity of interfacing to the Word document/engine. As your perl skills improve you could look at automating the process.

BTW, as an editor you may like to know that your node was put up for editorial/janitorial consideration to add some markup to make your node more readable. Normally you should use P tags like: <p>blah blah</p> to break up your nodes. Reading a long paragraph like yours is difficult on a screen. There are markup tips and links underneath where you can post, please review them. ;-)

Cheers,