Steve Litt
Wed, 09 May 2007 11:44:26 -0700
On Wednesday 09 May 2007 14:23, Rich Shepard wrote: > On Wed, 9 May 2007, Steve Litt wrote: > > Interesting article: > > How to Spot a Word Processed Book > > What jumps out at me when I look at a processed word book is the uneven > spacing between words on each line. The interletter and interword spacing > on a typeset page is much more subtle and the white space doesn't jump off > the page as a distraction. > > Of interest, perhaps, in light of the referenced web page is that > O'Reilly & Associates insist that their authors submit copy in MS Word > format. Considering the support ORA provides to the open source community, > and the prevalent use of TeX/LaTeX/LyX among linux users and writers, that > publisher won't accept camera-ready, typeset copy. A good friend of mine > was frustrated tremendously at having to re-do her book in OO.o to save it > as a .doc file. When I wrote Tim O'Reilly to ask why they have that policy > he never responded.
Hi Rich, I think I know why they want it in (barf) MS Word. Big publishers like O'Reilly (or in the case of my Samba Unleashed, Sams) take complete control of the book's layout. Working with a mainstream publisher is the ultimate WYSIWYM experience -- you as the author are responsible only for content. Your publisher gives you a list of styles you may (and must) use and a stylesheet telling how and when to use them. You do that, and the publisher takes care of the rest. If the publisher were to accept a LyX document (or LaTeX), they'd either need to accept the author's layout (bad idea when you publish a uniform series like Unleashed or Nutshell), or they'd need to translate back into MS Word with appropriate styles. Another reason they use MS Word is because MS Word has facilities to track changes, so the chapter documents that keep getting sent back and forth contain a complete history of queries, reponses and changes. Of course, one could ask "why not make LyX the official "wordprocessor" instead of MS Word, and supply a LyX layout instead of a MS Word style template. The answer is simply that it's very hard to find willing and qualified authors for the amount mainstream publishers are willing to pay, and it would be far easier to get the few LyX/LaTeX users to switch to MS Word than to get the multitudes of MS Word users to switch to LyX, which many haven't heard of, don't have, and don't know how to install. Your friend was in the minority of published authors who had already completed her book before "getting published". I cannot imagine what a horrendous hassle it would be to convert one of my books to MS Word, so I feel her pain. But for people like I was when I wrote Samba Unleashed, using MS Word with their stylesheet was trivially easy. And of course, in 1999-2000, every author had MS Word. SteveT Steve Litt Author: Universal Troubleshooting Process books and courseware http://www.troubleshooters.com/