I am reassured to discover that I am not the only one turned off by the tedious and reiterative banter of the Usual Suspects. Let me state my views: 1. XML should be at the centre of any text management (doh). 2. There should be one or more markup schemes for simple embellishment of text to trivialise conversion of existing text to XML. One of these MAY be zml, or my dottedfile format--or any other system that others prefer. The only requirement should be the easy conversion to good XML. 3. Given that we share a primary interest in books (text), it makes sense that the XML should conform to the XHTML doctype. 4. From that point on, (X)HTML and HTML/ePub are trivial to generate, while LaTeX and PDF come from XSLT--which is surprisingly easy. I am not trying to patronise--and I know full well that none of this is new. But I want to emphasise how practicable the approach is. I refer to my site (http://www.limpidsoft.com), which now has 60 books derived from PG source, generated in my spare time over the course of a few weeks. It will be immediately obvious that few of these books are perfect: bad page breaks will leap out from some of the PDFs and BB will just HATE the CSS. As any user of LaTeX will know, it is just a matter of hand-polishing the intermediate LaTeX files before the final conversion to PDFs. And I will eventually do this to the current files. At this point, though, I am satisfied that large-scale styling from PG text source IS practicable. SO, if PG were to establish and maintain canonical XML texts, would it not be future-proofed? John Redmond