On 10 May, 2007, at 6:45 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
On Wednesday 09 May 2007 14:23, Rich Shepard wrote:
On Wed, 9 May 2007, Steve Litt wrote:
Interesting article:
How to Spot a Word Processed Book
What jumps out at me when I look at a processed word book is the
uneven
spacing between words on each line. The interletter and interword
spacing
on a typeset page is much more subtle and the white space doesn't
jump off
the page as a distraction.
Of interest, perhaps, in light of the referenced web page is that
O'Reilly & Associates insist that their authors submit copy in MS Word
format. Considering the support ORA provides to the open source
community,
and the prevalent use of TeX/LaTeX/LyX among linux users and writers,
that
publisher won't accept camera-ready, typeset copy. A good friend of
mine
was frustrated tremendously at having to re-do her book in OO.o to
save it
as a .doc file. When I wrote Tim O'Reilly to ask why they have that
policy
he never responded.
Hi Rich,
I think I know why they want it in (barf) MS Word.
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.
Yes. In my field---Humanities---this is the almost universal rule. The
"academically serious publishers" (i.e. those you need to publish with
to get tenure ;-) ) want complete control and use MS Word as an editing
format which they will input, typically, into InDesign (used to be
Quark Xpress, but we know the story). Some of the most established
publishers will even take this approach a step further and actually
retype the whole book from the typescript, as it was done decades ago.
They claim it is actually cheaper to use someone in India to retype it
than to pay someone in the US to spot hidden problems in the word
processing file. (I had personal experience with this approach, I am
not kidding).
Similar situation with Humanities journals--Word is now required for
exactly the same reason. Now that I completely switched to LyX (I used
to be a Framemaker user, and FrameMaker has a more than decent FM-> MS
Word capabilities), I have to go through the unpleasant experience of
converting back to Word (through the OO route) before submitting.
Exporting to text and reimporting into Word is not really an option
because you lose all the basic formatting that actually conveys
important semantic information---from emphasis to footnotes to
sectioning, etcetera.
In my case---Humanities, again---the real solution would be a minimal
LyX MS Word export function that preserved the most essential,
content-bound formatting of the document: footnote/endnotes, emphasis,
headings, etc.
Of course, one could ask "why not make LyX the official "wordprocessor"
instead of MS Word, and supply a LyX layout instead of a MS Word style
template. The answer is simply that it's very hard to find willing and
qualified authors for the amount mainstream publishers are willing to
pay,
and it would be far easier to get the few LyX/LaTeX users to switch to
MS
Word than to get the multitudes of MS Word users to switch to LyX,
which many
haven't heard of, don't have, and don't know how to install.
Exactly. The vast majority of my colleagues are not even aware that
there is a category difference between "word processor" and "MS Word."
The tend to think there is no difference between the two terms and
could not care less for an explanation of such difference.
Cheers,
S.
__________________________________________________
Stefano Franchi
Department of Philosophy Ph: (64) 9 373-7599 x83940
University Of Auckland Fax: (64) 9 373-8768
Private Bag 92019 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Auckland
New Zealand
__________________________________________________
Stefano Franchi
Department of Philosophy Ph: (64) 9 373-7599 x83940
University Of Auckland Fax: (64) 9 373-8768
Private Bag 92019 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Auckland
New Zealand
