Rich Shepard wrote: > [...] > When I wrote Tim O'Reilly to ask why they have that policy he > never responded. >
I guess they do it for pragmatic reasons. It is just the "editor" that is most common among writers - and documents are most probably converted into an in-house format for the typesetting. (Maybe they even use TeX internally...) However, there are probably professional service providers that have good (and expensive) tools for this or even do it completely for you. Restricting the number of input formats just simplifies the process. Besides that Word has two features that are probably highly beneficial for the editing process: One is the already mentioned change tracking support, which is really good for sending back and forth documents between the author and the editor. Believe me, diff is *not* a reasonable alternative to that :-) The biology journals my fiancée submitted her papers to, for instance, insisted on Word format. The benefit was that all the editing was done in Word as well, so she could immediately see what was changed by the editor, read the corresponding editor's comment, decide for accepting or rejecting the change and annotate this with another comment. Springer, in contrast, always sents me back re-scanned copies of the PDF printouts with the editor's remarks. I have to look for the right place in the LyX document, change it there (or not), and write an extra report explaining where I did what and why: "section 2.3, first paragraph, second sentence: replaced "foo" by "bar"... The relatively new "change tracking" feature of LyX definitely goes into a good direction. however, is still far behind and so far (IMHO) practically unusable. Another unique selling point of Word is the language checker (spell and grammar), which is an order of magnitude better than aspell, ispell and everything else I have seen so far. For a publisher this might be a strong argument, as submitted documents already contain significantly fewer language issues that have to be corrected by editors. I still use Word for the final spell check of my documents. After the LyX spell checker run and proof-reading everything, I just copy the whole text into an empty word document and look for suspicious red and green lines. This is quite an effort, but worth it: I always find several language issues that were not detected before. (I have been thinking about developing an aspell interface to the Word spell checker, so I can directly use it from within LyX.) However, don't get me wrong: I *love* writing with LyX and I am continuously trying to convince my students to use it :-) It is just that I have quite some experience with Word as well, which clearly has some strong points we could learn from. Daniel
