jim said:

What I don’t understand is why PG continues to be wedded to plain-text as an *input* encoding format demanded of people submitting texts to PG. 

well, if you _honestly_ "don't understand" the reason, jim, then i must say that you certainly aren't trying very hard... the plain-text format is the most valuable to people because it is the most pliable when it comes to reworking the content.

Plain-text is too constrained to do the job well. 

first you want to constrain the format to an archaic definition... then you want to complain about it because it's too constrained. that's disingenuous.

HTML is too ambiguous, and too ill-matched to books to do well.

no, that's not the problem -- .html can do a fine job on books, for the most part, but the problem is that's it's a pain to create.

We need something else, something that CAN be correctly and automagically converted “correctly” to one or another formats including plain-text, and Unicode, and HTML, and  mobi, etc. 

that "something else" is z.m.l.

And something that allows the simple every day tasks of the encoder, including italics and m-dash and poetry, titles and chapters and subchapters, publisher info, dates, etc to be handled correctly and easily.

again, you're talking about z.m.l. but, you know, you can invent your own equivalent, if you like...

PS: Bit curious which blind reader handles _the underscore “convention”_ correctly – I’ve not seen _that_ one!

i'll let tony answer that question. -bowerbird