Long XML files can be daunting for humans to read. Of course, XML is really designed for computers to read - not people - but there are times when mere mortals do need to read and edit XML by hand. For example, if your application stores its configuration in XML, or you need to dump some XML to STDOUT for debugging purposes. Syntax highlighting helps, but to really make sense of some XML, proper indentation can be vital. Hence XML::LibXML::PrettyPrint - it can be applied to an XML::LibXML DOM tree to reformat it into a more readable result. Pretty-printing XML is not as CPU-efficient as dumping it out sloppily, so unless you're pretty sure that a human is going to need to make sense of your XML, you should probably not use this module.