I just tried that and it doesn't look like it changes too much from what you type in. Looking at the file that you are reading, does the text file contain the actual text "\n" (two characters) or does it contain a newline. If it contains the two separate characters, the characters won't ever get interpolated as a newline.

Something that will lighten the load of your swaps (especially on large documents) is to first delimit your swap in variables (instead of "PRINTER" put some special characters around it such as "__printer__"), and then swap in keys from a hash as in the following:

# set up a hash containing the values you want
my %SWAPS = ();
$SWAPS{printer} = $printer;
$SWAPS{quota} = $quota;
if($pagestate eq "duplex"){
  $SWAPS{pagestate} = 'double sided';
}elsif ($pagestate eq "simplex"){
  $SWAPS{pagestate} = 'single sided';
}
if( 1 ){
  $SWAPS{multiplier} = 'some_multiplier';
}

# swap out things like __printer__ with $SWAPS{printer}
$msg =~ s/__(\w+?)__/$SWAPS{$1}/g;
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This does only one parse on the string and is a little bit more controlled than doing the multiple swap thing.

my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];