Hello Gareth
I buy the fonts that I need and *think* (hope!) I am still within the
requisite licensing parameters. OUP, at least, have never expressed any
qualms, though it's certainly a very long time since they asked me about
what faces I had available. (It's also, as it happens, rather a long time
since they asked me to do a book, and I think I may have gone off their
radar as they have a workflow arrangement that doesn't really cater for the
same person combining jobs that are usually at successive stages of the
production schedule, so only my classics periodical remains in the portfolio
at present: when I started my all-singing, all-dancing performance this was
hailed as the way things would 'obviously' go in future, but I seem to have
remained, or become, a rara avis that doesn't fit in with their m.o. But
the fact that I have always typeset in TeX has never been indicated as
problematic in itself.)
I wouldn't have any confidence about a program claiming to convert my .TEX
files into useable Word files. I guess if I could be bothered to acquire
competence in Perl (vel sim.) I might come up with something custom-made to
match the way I mark up a (Xe)TeX document, but I should have thought a more
promising line would be to read the resulting PDF into Word - a
XeTeX-produced PDF (at least in a language-based text with fairly standard
layout) ought to have pretty robust Unicode that could be made recognizable
to Word, though a perfect replica of the format of the PDF is surely rather
unlikely.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gareth Hughes" <[email protected]>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <[email protected]>
Sent: 22 October 2010 17:33
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly community
John Was wrote:
Hello
Hello, John.
If it's of any interest, I have been using TeX for many years now to
produce OUP humanities publications (Oxford Studies in Ancient
Philosophy, recent fascicules of the Medieval Latin Dictionary from
British Sources [British Academy but published by OUP], and dozens of
monographs in the field of Greek and Latin, with occasional forays into
Hebrew and Arabic). XeTeX has been a great boon but I have always
stayed clear of LaTeX flavours, for various reasons - initially, if I
can recall with any accuracy my thoughts of 15 years ago or more,
because it was at that time rather inflexible (I'm sure I remember a
handbook which stated that it was so difficult to adjust the
\baselineskip that those preparing their theses in LaTeX should request
a dispensation from the normal rule of double spacing).
This is good news, seeing as my experience of OUP has been having to
work with word-processed files. What do you do with fonts? Does OUP give
you their fonts? Otherwise, I would imagine that they would need to make
sure that the font licence allows for commercial publication. At least
with theses, seeing as universities are used to scientist wanting to to
use TeX, they don't get too upset with the rest of us doing so. Even
though double spacing is still ugly, it is not too difficult to achieve.
However, I only occasionally do naked typesetting, as it were, and am
normally employed as copy-editor-cum-typesetter, so that I receive
word-processed files (almost inevitably in Word these days) and work on
them as I see fit, producing PDFs at the end of the process for the
manufacturing printer to work with. I have some very elaborate Word
macros set up (barely comprehensible to me!) to convert Word italic into
{\it ....\/}, footnotes into {\fn{....}} etc. (I have double braces
round my footnotes for reasons that I won't go into), and it all works
reasonably smoothly - certainly Greek is a breeze now that I don't have
to convert everything to WordPerfect 5.1 and then into a rebarbative
transliteration system, as I did when using pure ASCII-based EmTeX.
...and punch holes in cards! I find the problem with many tools for
going from TeX to wp or the reverse is that many try to deal with whole
documents rather than snippets. I would rather write my preamble and
then paste in such converted snippets.
Interestingly, OUP have recently started requesting my source files
(viz. .TEX files) for achiving when I hand over the PDFs of a completed
job, though I'm not sure what use they could ever make of them. I guess
their idea is that they might be able to introduce corrections, extra
bibliography, etc. for future editions in-house, but I rather think that
with my volumes they will be stumped, particularly after I'm
institutionalized, buried, or executed for letting through too many
typos.
Hah! I can understand why OUP want to archive accessible sources, even
if they can't in reality do anything with them. I wonder if they keep
copies of all those word-processed files too. When I have produced
beamer slides for someone, I included a clearly marked-up source file so
that the presentation could be altered in the future without necessarily
having to come back to me.
Gareth.
--
Gareth Hughes
Doctoral candidate in Syriac studies
Department of Eastern Christianity
Oriental Institute
Pusey Lane
Oxford
OX1 2LE
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