Re: How to Spot a Word Processed Book

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 9 May 2007, Steve Litt wrote:

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.

  Except for publishers such as Springer-Verlag. They have a TeXpert on
staff in New York (and Germany, too, I presume) and several LaTeX styles. I
used their monography style for my book and other than working from the copy
editor's printed copy (single-sided, too!) and having them check all the
output files I sent as a tarball, I did the layout. Except for the few front
pages; so I started page numbering at 'v' instead of 'i'.

  The only issue was when I sent a few chapters to their TeXpert and he
wanted me to change \textsllipsis to \ldots. I looked up the differences on
the TUG web site and they're very, very subtle. So, I did a global
search-and-replace in the text and just used \ldots. What the heck? Didn't
matter to me.

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.

  Perhaps this is different with scientific books. I had no one at Springer
changing -- or requesting changes -- to the text. My friends who reviewed
drafts suggested changes, but I made those.

Your friend was in the minority of published authors who had already completed
her book before "getting published".

  I suppose that if publishers knew the subject matter as well as do the
authors this might be an issue. My editor, copy editor, and production
editor just did their things from the business end but left the writing to
me.

Rich

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Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |    The Environmental Permitting
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