David Vaile's dashboard

Tim: I find that the formatting is horribly preserved when you try to import HTML (which gets to be some very messy markup in PBWiki) into Word. Sure, it works well for a simple collaborative text page, but when you start adding tables and styles the wheels start to come off. Also, there's no easy way to link pages.

Still, your point is well taken - if the html works for you, life is good.

You know.. Word can open html pages and save them as .doc files...

for 1.0 wikis, you can save out the http://wikiname.pbwiki.com/pagename?r... version of the page...
in 2.0 wikis, use this page: http://wikiname.pbwiki.com/pagename?m...

If there are images, you can save the page as "html complete" in internet explorer to make sure that they get preserved as well..

I've had great luck with this method, hope it works for you as well.

David: I agree with your point about "collaborative authoring" falling short if you can only author wiki pages.

Gabriel: Yup... Google can do collaborative document authoring, but not even their "sites" allow for consuming the wiki as anything other than html.

One of the key issues is footnotes. If footnotes from a serious wiki doc can be reintegrated into a form that can be converted to Word or even better, RTF, then these are useful for all sorts of other publishing purposes. Without this, the fantastic open collaborative authoring capability is crippled, because not all projects can use Wiki online format as their only output format.