Although I've made / discovered some of the other little tools I've
needed (as part of learning), the columnizing that I'm describing is
beyond my means right now.  I sure would be interested in seeing a
library ported, and I'd help if I could be useful.

I would have thought that such things already existed.  After all,
people who make forms and such would do this for theall the time.  I
wonder if there's anything in PDF::Writer or one of the other
pdf-generating libraries.

..

As an aside, I was thinking of writing some kind of wrapper to help
with the colour functions in HighLine, so that I cound use strings
like this:

colour_puts "@RBold Red @rred @YBold yellow"

(using your imagination)
Bold Red red Bold yellow

etc.  It doesn't feel very difficult, but it would sure be easier for
me to use colour codes like this then to bust strings up and feed them
to HighLine the way I am right now.

In such markup
rgbcmywg = red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, white (grey),
green .. and with capitals = bold
@@ = @

Some other convention for background colour and other tags (underline?
blink?) could work as well.. but that would be for down the road.

I figure this is a bit of a stretch for me but would be educational to try.