LyX scores with a publisher!

[Ronald Florence]

I've noted in the past that LyX is a frustration in dealing with trade 
publishers (like Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster) for 
books intended for the general public.  Unlike some scientific 
publishers, trade publishers do not accept manuscripts in LaTeX, LyX or 
any format but ms-word or perhaps WordPerfect.  Indeed, my last 
manuscript, which is to be published this fall by the University of 
Wisconsin Press, had to be run through latex2rtf before submission. 
This proved a disaster, as there were many characters from transcribed 
Arabic and Hebrew which required underdots or overscores that the .rtf 
did not reproduce.

Today brought a golden lining to that cloud.  Some of the people we 
solicited for jacket comments, including Elie Wiesel, insisted on 
reading bound proofs instead of loose manuscript pages.  Normally proofs 
would come late in the publishing project, but an open-minded publicity 
person at the press announced, after looking at the beautifully 
formatted LyX manuscript pages, that they were so attractive they could 
be bound as proofs.  I made a simple change in the ms. to generate 
double-sided output, sent them the .pdf, and they bound the pages.  This 
is literally the first time, out of 8 published books, that I have ever 
encountered a welcome to LyX or LaTeX from a trade or university press.

Of course the actual book will be produced from the .rtfs with much 
time-consuming manual correction by the copy-editor and me.  Such is the 
inertia in the trade publishing world.
--

Ronald Florence				www.18james.com