Karl Wick wrote in part:

Mav: Why PS instead of PDF ? Is there a reader for it ? ( I tried to download a PS document a while back and could not figure out how to use it).

Search online for "Ghostview". I installed this on Windows 95 years ago -- one assumes that it still works on XP! ^_^

The real purpose of PS, however, is to send it directly to your printer. In the Unix world, at least, PS is still the standard format in which to send typeset documents to a printer, so I expect that most printers these days should support it. Conceivably, publishing would be easiest in PS format.

It seems sometimes like the world is lacking a decent open-source word processing / printing file format.

That's PostScript! Well, mostly. Adobe's patent claims on PS are very weak, and they're not really interested in defending them, since PDF is their baby these days. Also for that reason, PS is unlikely to change later. Since patents still expire in a reasonable time and the PS spec is entirely publicly known, it's quite unlikely that PS will ever stop working (in the practical sense that we can't write a program for it). And Ghostscript (a PS editor) is GPL software.

However, I don't see that we need to make a /choice/. The source for our books will always be wiki markup. We can convert that to any format that we like -- choosing whatever works best for our evolving purposes.

-- Toby