The selection should be driven by the value of the document itself and the goal it tries to achieve. However, the way they create, validate, revise, exchange, publish and archive these documents can have a great impact on the benefit they can obtain from their handling of electronic documents. Or you have kept the document as a set of HTML 2.0 files and now you need a PostScript version of it for a quality paper output. This paper describes some ideas about how to increase the reusability of electronic documents by carefully selecting their formats, and thus the tools generating those formats. The selection should be driven by the value of the document itself and the goal it tries to achieve.
Any document has a lifecycle.
The selection of a document format is very much influenced by the magnitude of the lifecycle and by the step reached within the lifecycle of the document. Do not forget that some languages require more characters than others, they may also use diacritical signs as French for accented vowels. There is a real danger of loosing the access to the information buried in a file encoded in such a format, specially after a while. The format '.doc' used by Microsoft Word is not publicly documented and can be changed at any moment by Microsoft without warrant of backward compatibility. New formats will appear at each step of the technology evolution.