dennis said:

- The huge benefit of HTML (besides the text formatting that you mentioned) is the ability to insert images. Some books I would never have considered working on if could not have done an HTML.

the ability of a web-browser to combine text and images is indeed truly wonderful. doing that -- cross-platform, 24/7, world-wide -- was one big reason the web took off. but, just as you need to use a certain kind of viewer-app (i.e., that web-browser) to attain this inclusion of images, an intelligent viewer for e-texts can _also_ achieve this. regular text-viewers won't do it. but specialized ones will. indeed, my viewer-program shows images when it is used to display a text-file, _provided_ that text-file includes information that tells _which_ image to display _where_. (just like a web-browser needs the img tag with that info.) amazingly, however, this obviously-relevant-and-important information is often simply _not_included_ in the text-file. indeed, the information is sometimes _stripped_from_ files! (the in-process working files from distributed proofreaders routinely contain a note regarding the presence of an image, a line that contains the caption for the image if there is one.) what is needed, so that an intelligent viewer-program can know where to place an image, and what file contains it, is some kind of indicator in the file giving that information. the indicator could be as crude as a filename, or it could be more subtle. (i'll detail this, if you would like me to do so.) all of this is just to resubmit a plea that i have made before (and will _continue_ making until i get a positive response!) for information about the name and location of graphic-files to be included in the _plain-text_ versions of the e-texts... -bowerbird