Help needed in migrating from Windows

The code snippet below prints out a bilingual dictionary of mine into MSWord. The dictionary entries are in an XML file that I edit with VIM. The Perl script parses the file, processes and sorts the data and puts it in a data structure of paragraphs composed of pieces of text with formatting instructions (I may add more options in the future). I can also print out plain text or html with similar routines. The Word output has the advantage of allowing me to add page numbers and insert an introduction etc easily.

I would like to migrate this to Linux (I have XP SuSE 9.1 dual boot on my notebook) but am unsure of which program to replace Word with. OOo does not seem to automate as easily. I don't know which line to go down: TeX, PDF, a different Word processor? It would be easy to output XML and then use a 'stylesheet' to get this to output PDF for instance if there was a program around to do this step. Any thoughts on what tools I should be considering?

Thanks,

Dave

sub wordprint { use Win32::OLE; my $word = CreateObject Win32::OLE 'Word.Application' or die $!; my $i = 0; $i++; last if $i == 50; # just a few for debugging } } } } else { } } } }