Yes, I really should pick up XML because I'm in the publishing industry. I can see 3 milestones for my project:

(1) Perl with text files.

(2) Perl with HTML files for the greater functionality of being able to handle Word document elements such as superscripts, fonts, etc. (Or bite the bullet and do it with VB if this approach fails to work).

(3) Perl with XML. At this point, I should have a marketable product and the big bucks should start flowing in. :-)

What are STM books? STM stands for "scientific, technical, and medical." But it's the IT books that drive us up the wall with the jargon, acronyms, and terms uppercased or not depending on the author's whims. My Perl project is primarily directed toward taming IT books. Most sciences have fairly stable conventions regarding nomenclature, but not IT methinks.

Would you say "I bought two mouses from the store" or "I bought two mice from the store"? And which would choose: keystream, key stream, or key-stream? We had one book where it appeared all three ways.

By the way, are there no well-known freeware Word-to-XML converters?

Thanks, everybody, for all the help.