Well I'm still in the Press once a week at least (for choir practice!) so I
shall make sure these comments reach the right ears. They correspond,
unfortunately to my own impression. Leofranc Holford-Strevens works
heroically on critical editions but he is the sole in-house editor left and
can't possibly handle them all. I think he is pretty well full-time on
large projects with extensive commentary (and still finds time to publish
and lecture extensively on an astonishing range of topics).
Getting back to TeX-related matters, the hyphenation patterns available in
XeTeX (even to 'plain' users like myself) are an enormous help, even if I
disagree with the English at frequent points (the Latin rarely lets me down,
aside from a few rogues - is hucusque one? - which I guess are analagous to
Knuth's 'manuscript' in refusing to comply with the algorithms). No one
bothers to read people like Priscian on what should be done with Greek and
Latin, and no one at OUP involved in passing proofs would have the faintest
idea about this subject. Neither, alas, do authors - with the Dictionary of
Medieval Latin (which I have just relinquished with completion of Fascicule
XIII in the middle of letter 'R') it was left entirely to me, and I fear
that laxity in this matter will pervade future fascicules as it did in some
of those that preceded my involvement. When I asked the compilers to keep
a look-out for any bad hyphenations that I might have missed in perusing and
correcting the proofs, they asked me to explain the rules!
John
----- Original Message -----
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: 23 October 2010 15:05
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly community
Yes, as you would guess, the copy-editor marked up my files by hand
and sent me the hard copy.
Recent OUP critical editions in Greek prose could use a lot more
copy-editing; I would assert that their production standards in this
area have fallen drastically in the last decade. We have new editions
of the Greek orators Demosthenes and Lysias in the Oxford Classical
Text series, all filled with rampant flaws in hyphenation and line
numbering in the apparatus. Reviews have also identified numerous
slips of a more substantial nature, that seem to suggest very little
copy-editing is happening on these in house. It seems that OUP has
adopted new modes of production for these critical editions that
create these problems, and authors (and copy-editors?) don't regularly
take the time to fix it all. I know in the case of my book the
copy-editor, who was otherwise very attentive, didn't seem to have
looked at the Greek at all.
The other major series of critical texts in Greek (and Latin), on the
other hand, the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, has been shuffled from one
publisher to another in the last decade. It's now in the hands of De
Gruyter, who seems devoted to its revitalization. They're requiring
all editors to submit camera-ready-copy, and recommending that they
use Critical Edition Typesetter (<http://www.karas.ch/cet/>). I have
the impression they only really care about the appearance of the CRC,
though, and wouldn't really care if authors prefer other typesetting
systems.
Jud Herrman
On 2010-10-23, John Was
<[email protected]> wrote:
OUP will normally be amenable if saving money is in prospect! I think
the
barrier here has always been the copy-editing process (now more
vulnerable
since house style is not seen as so important and indeed there is no
longer
any copy-editing department at OUP). A critical edition will normally
require a rather small amount of copy-editing, though there is still the
introduction and commentary to consider - but if a TeX-savvy author is
willing to implement those copy-editing changes and suggestions s/he
agrees
with, there is no real difficulty. The copy-editor would then presumably
work by pen(cil) on a draft PDF printout in the traditional way (or by
annotating the PDF electronically, which can be tedious).
Or of course one can simply trust the author not to make any mistakes at
all, and forgo copy-editing. Even twenty years ago this was mentioned as
a
possibility at OUP but no one dared to do it in my time there.
But I hope this doesn't become too much of a trend or I'll have to look
for
something else to do! In the meantime, I must dust down my old brown OCT
of
Hyperides...
John
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