How can I enhance the look of the Perl/TK GUI under Perl 5.004?

You could use the Tk theme engine to give your app better looks.

Try using images instead of button elements, then you can have whatever style you like and the fonts can be baked in. This will work for pretty much any element where the contents are not dynamic - including backgrounds on panes and such. Granted it's more work but it does solve your problem, especially if you have a competent artist in your project group.

Using optionAdd to tweak defaults through the option database is a reasonable start. A thread about this can be found at:

http://tcl.projectforum.com/tk/221

Download griffin.kit from there, use the sdx tool to unwrap it and locate griffin.tcl to get a good set of option settings.

http://wiki.tcl.tk/3411 for the sdx tool.