Thanks for the responses. perldoc -t doesn't seem to change anything. On my Windows system, perldoc seems to be perldoc.bat which is a quite long confusing file. I have tried editing (a copy) of that with some success, but I thought I shouldn't have to do that.
The output of perldoc can't be sent to a file by e.g.
perldoc perldoc > perldoc.txt
which seems strange to me (although I can achieve such a result in a different way.)
Perhaps it is something about my machines. I am running Windows 98 on 2 similar machines. On one of them backquotes doesn't seem to work correctly; @dir=`dir` causes the directory listing to be printed to the screen but @dir receives nothing. (I mention this because I tried to rewrite perldoc by capturing the output with backquotes and then filtering that in some way.) I guess I will switch to Linux one of these days.
chas