On Mon, 19 Jun 2006, Richard Heck wrote:
I have found LyX to deliver precisely what it purports to offer: I
concentrate more on my writing and less on formatting. It seems crazy in
retrospect, but when I was using a traditional word processor
(WordPerfect, in my case), I'd spend a ridiculously long time worrying
about hyphenation, line length, and the like, and that despite the fact
that it didn't make a bit of difference, since I was probably going to
re-write the paragraph I was so worried about the next day. (I've spoken
to other people and have found this to be a common experience.)
Richard,
When I worked for others in the corporate world, I found that the PHBs were
the worst on this. They'd obsess about format ("why can't you put the org
chart block on the other side?") than the content. This is probably still the
case, as seen in Dilbert each day.
Journals do of course have their own styles, but I've never once had a
journal send a paper back to me insisting that I put the references in
form A or form B, and the journals that are really insistent all produce
their own BibTeX styles, anyway.
I was very pleased to learn that when Springer-Verlag asked to publish my
book, they provided their own class (svmono) for monographs, and they have a
TeXpert on staff in New York because they prefer to get documents submitted
camera ready. Well, when the TeXpert looked at the first few chapters for
consistency with their standards, he asked me to replace all instances of
\textellipsis with \ldots. Huh? What's that? So, I pulled down my copy of
TLC2, and discovered that there are multiple typographic standards for the
specing of an ellipsis (...) in text, including the spacing of following
punctuation. Well, my eyes quickly glazed over with all that minutiae, so I
shrugged, loaded the .lyx file into emacs, did a global search and replace,
and was done.
I still don't care about the differences between \textellipsis and \ldots.
:-)
Rich
--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.(TM) | Accelerator
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863
