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[Azerty]

Fron the DevDiary entry for yesterday, April 25th:

In any case, once you have your parchment sheets (or papyrus strip sheets, or various paper sheets made from milled then pressed pulp), then you have a choice between making scroll rollers from some hard material and then making a scroll, or you can make the sheet into a quire. Scrolls and quires will be able to accept writing. As a final step with quires, a dwarf can make book bindings, then use the bindings, written-on quires and thread to make codices. There's a new basic hard-coded "sheet" item, kind of like cloth, but everything else about the process is in the various raws, getting some use out of the new ability to place improvements on products (so the scroll rollers' general properties can be maintained on the final scroll, for example).

We know the material used to do these hardcoded sheets will be either papyrus, animal skins or wood pulp; we could add old clothes, but wood was used only after 1843, thus way after the cut-off.

Moreover, other materials was used as a writing support:

• Bark of trees
• Old clothes was used
• Large tree leaves, such as palm ones
• Strips of wood and bamboo
• Bones
• Clothes, such as silk
• Metal

Lastly, people should be able, both in the Fortress and in the Legend modes, to reuse older writings in cases of lack of writing material, as it was done in the Middle Ages with the palimpsests - the books used to do this would be obsolete technical sources (for exemple, a book who would advocate bloodletting would be obsolete today in medicine), books of a religion which is no longer practicised by the owners (Pagan prayers were replaced with Christian scriptures) or books whose language is no understood by the holders; decipherment would be possible by the use of magnifying glasses.

[AceSV]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=148613.msg6045263

Cloth rags seem to be the original material of choice. 

[FortressBuilder]

I would also add wax and stone tablets to the list.

[Saraias]

Regardless of any ideas for the proliferation of new materials for writing surfaces, or more complex things to do with writing -- all of which are potentially cool and very Dwarf Fortress -- I must add my emphatic support for the idea of paper from old clothing.

Worn apparel is the single greatest source of clutter in my fortresses. I spend an inordinate amount of game play time trying to manage it all, to clean up and to try to diminish clutter-based FPS loss. In a 50-year fort with hundreds of citizens, rag management can become all-consuming. It quickly becomes a problem even in a young fort.

A means to be rid of it all (automated with jobs on repeat or default orders to make paper from rags), with the very practical and dwarfy benefit of recycling the waste into usable paper, would make an immediate and profound improvement to an existing problem.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm not sure there's much mechanical difference between paper made of wood pulp and a "scroll" made of strips of wood or bamboo, however.  It likely just involves 1 log = 1 unit of "scroll".

Also, if we're talking ancient writing surfaces, clay/ceramics are obvious.  Stone, because we're talking dwarves, in slab form is obvious, as well. 

There should also be ways of using decorations as means of transmitting information, however.  (Gem or stained-glass) windows, frescos engraved into walls, any sort of "decorate object", or use of glazes on pottery would all be ways to convey information already contained in some form within the game, already.

It's possible to make "books" or "scrolls" with engraved metal plates, or if you're REALLY going for the most extravagant materials (appropriate for divine or imperial records, only,) full-color enameled metal or glazed ceramic grimoires.  (Which basically means using metals as ink...)