At 9:05 AM -0400 9/17/07, David W. Fenton wrote:
But a journal accepting submissings for publication has to be more
versatile in what it can accept,
But, if they have acceptance standards, why can they not enforce them?
To put it in very Victorian terms: If their standards say that they
accept only typewritten copy, should they accept hand-written script
on a pack of envelopes?
since many times the end users of Microsoft products are not
actually aware of the document format
issues involved.
I think somebody could feel insulted by that.
It's probably just "end users of Microsoft products" who are not
"actually aware," so I guess it's not something I should worry about.
why shouldn't they also accept the new MS Word format?
Because it impairs their workflow and they find the new format unnecessary?
To allow .docx would require them to change their workflow. That's
an expensive choice when the option is to merely disallow .docx.
It doesn't necessarily change their workflow.
Their workflow does not incorporate .docx.
To incorporate .docx in their workflow would change their workflow by
adding translators and/or other programs.
How does the inclusion of .docx not "necessarily change their workflow?"
Without a _full_ description it _cannot_ become an international standard.
I haven't followed the details, but I thought the objectsion were
not to the documentation but to the capabilities of it (or maybe the
implementation details).
Microsoft has posited .docx as an international standard.
To be accepted as an international standard any submission must be
entirely transparent: It's documentation must totally, fully and
completely describe it.
The .docx submission did not pass this test.
IMHO that seems totally imbecilic on Microsoft's part. ISO
recognition and recommendation is too important to flub.
The only conclusion I can draw is that Microsoft doesn't fully
understand the format themselves.
(Or that they are playing a typical Microsoft game and trying to
sneak through a "standard" that others won't be able to fully
replicate, so that they can use some obscure hooks in it with the
next generation of their OS and programs.)
Huh. I have assisted with two different academic music journals and
neither of them was automated at all.
You might want to check out JOSA (a/b), JAMA, APS (Phys. Rev. A..E,
etc.), Nature, Science, Physics Today, etc.
They are extremely automated in their journal production.
Normal human beings don't need to deal with extraneous hassles for
which they see no benefit.
Which is exactly why the journals should accept docx, so that those
submitting articles don't need to worry about it.
Thus the supplicant should be exempted from the rules of the master?
The *.docx format serves a completely different purpose than PDF
That is not my interpretation of Microsoft's repeated assertions.
MS has a completely different portable document format whose name I forget.
I'd appreciate knowing it.
To the best of my knowledge .docx was the format that would knock
Adobe off it's pedestal and conquer the world as the Great New
Document Language...
It's called XPS (i.e., XML Paper Specification). See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Paper_Specification
I had never heard of it before.
I do like the header notation from Wikipedia:
<quote>
This article or section is written like an advertisement.
Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view.
Mark blatant advertising for speedy deletion, using {{db-spam}}.
</quote>
Regardless, what I have repeatedly read in the trade press is that
Microsoft was positioning .docx as the undoing of PDF.
Since .docx is XML and XPS is an "XML Paper Specification" and .docx
is a "paper specification" it looks to me like this is just a new PR
wrapper around .docx to rename it XPS.
And, as I said, it serves a completely different purpose than docx
and all the other Office file formats -- it's a page description
format for portability, not a data storage format specific to
specific applications.
That is contrary to what I've read in the press:
Microsoft was promoting .docx as a self-contained and portable
alternative to PDF. Now it is (apparently, though not vociferously)
promoting XPS, but I see no difference other than the name.
And all that said, PDF is not an open format, either. It was easy to
reverse engineer, precisely because PostScript is a plain-text
page-description language, but it is no more an ISO standard than
docx.
PDF has been fully described..
Adobe first published the complete PDF specification for use without
restriction in 1993
See: <http://www.adobe.com/pdf/release_pdf_faq.html>
Is it an ISO standard?
Yes.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/X>
Best wishes,
-=-Dennis
.
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
Finale@shsu.edu
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
