I am a proof reader at a journal of my departement (political
science) and I always kindly ask every author to simply send me an
RTF and to do no formatting whatsoever (I always change it all in a
font and format that I find easy to read as in the layout it's being
changed anyway but people still LOVE to format their work in their
way – although our style sheet explicitly tells them to not do so),
then I print the work out (there are mistakes that you will never
find on screen or where you simply have to be really, really cautios
and that's simply annoying), make my corrections, change the text,
save it as an RTF and send it back to the author and then...
...then they complain about their Word not being able to open the
file. Or, if it does, their Word is not able to import the German
Umlaute (äöüß) properly (me working on OS X). Then I usually send an
PDF and again, they are not able to import everything correctly.
Well, that's usually the point where I give up (sometimes I do send a
few links to Wikipedia articles on exchange formats and the like
though) and simply save it as a doc and send it to them. But the
worst thing is, if they use the correction function in Word (which
people really do). Even with OpenOffice I have a lot of problems and
there is not one thing in the world that makes computer life so
complicated as Word and its »special functions«...
My recommendation: forget about that language lab, if they work only
on screen, they do not work properly (your eyes get so tired after a
while even if you use some of the best screens out there) and get
someone who will read printed work (or, if you're cautios enough:
read it yourself). That way, you can also use the eye-easing LaTeX-
layout for whoever will read the work and not those diseases called
Times New Roman or Arial... ;)
Max
________________________________________________________
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html for details.
