On 12 Dec, 2006, at 1:25 PM, Martin Vermeer wrote:
...and nothing based on the Word paradigm, including OOo and Abi, is
good enough for anything beyond an office memo. Yes, millions of people
use it. Millions of flies eat sh*t too.
Martin,
I think you are missing the point. Publishers will *not* use Word to
produce final output (although even here there are known
exceptions...). What they'll do is to use Word format as a lingua
franca: they'll pick up the file they receive from the author and
insert it into a real, pro-quality publishing SW. That used to be Quark
XPress, now it's most likely going to be Adobe InDesign. The real
formatting, typographical tweaking, etc, is done there, either by
in-house professionals or by external consultants (for smaller houses).
Similarly for professionally produced journals. That's why I insisted
that my ideal converter to Word should only keep the minimal,
semantically relevant formatting and discard every else. I would not
particularly care if the output looks ugly---it is only an intermediate
format that will be read, at most, by the production editor.
LaTeX output is hard to beat when typographical quality is needed,
agreed. Word's quality is worse than what flies eat. I agree there as
well. But my point is that in the humanities and social sciences we
face a different kind of problem: Word has become the lingua franca of
author/publisher communication and those of us who are in love with LyX
clean, structured approach to writing have to put up with it. It has
nothing to do with producing beautiful documents---that goal is not up
to the author. It has to do with allowing the author to communicate
with the publisher and allowing the latter to produce a beautiful
document (well, in the best case) with their own tools.
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
