On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 01:41:36PM -0600, Stefano Franchi wrote: > > 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.
Yes, I know. And that means they can accept a PDF produced by LaTeX. The typesetter of a journal I am the E-i-C of does precisely this, and he is happy that it saves him a lot of work compared to the manuscripts -- the great majority -- that he receives in Word format. And with a better looking result. Stefano, insisting on a Word document is mostly laziness in this case. > 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. I don't know precisely what philosophical manuscripts look like, but in most of the humanities even there are complex formatting features -- like tables, bullet lists, etc. -- that are not easily captured in plain, unformatted text, which is pretty much the only common denominator that can be losslessly converted between Word and LyX/LaTeX. And if you really have such a clean, unformatted doc, why not export it as plain text, or cut and paste via the clipboard? I have done that. > 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. Sure, I see that's what you want to achieve. I only question that it can be done in a way that makes practical sense, except in special cases. It's like sending a hi-fi musical recording over a poor phone line only in order to have the piece recreated by an orchestra hired on the other end ;-) I would't mind too much if someone else payed for the orchestra, but it feels like a waste. And I would resent if it played poorer than me. (Writes Martin, who is completely un-musical)
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