On Mar 3, 2005, at 1:53 AM, Juergen Spitzmueller wrote:
* especially in human sciences, LaTeX and LyX is almost unknown, so you
finally have to stick with word. I am not aware of a single journal in my
subject that accepts latex files, not to speak about the proceedings.
* Some tools missing (e.g. grammar checking, thesaurus in other languages than
English)
Jürgen
Perspectives from a human scientist (philosopher) who has switched to LyX for good after countless years of Word and Framemaker:
For articles: You *must* become proficient at converting from LaTeX to Word. Every journal I am aware of accepts word only files (or rtf). On the other hand, the vast majority of humanities journals redo the typesetting in-house. Which means you do not have to worry about the look of your converted document, you just need to worry about logical structure (i.e. preserving references and cross-references, etc.). Final adjustments and copy-editing are made on *paper*, not on the file. The best solution I have found is to go Lyx--> Latex--> OpenOffice--> Word.
In short: it is not as bad at it could be.
For books: Big publishers (i.e. big UP presses) behave as journals: they want word files and will re-typeset everything. (Actually some p. houses will retype everything from paper...). Smaller publishing houses and/or imprints will want a camera-ready manuscript and assume you will use Word and provide instructions accordingly (i.e. "11pt for the body text," "skip two lines before a section heading", etc.). You must become good at _LaTeX_ to produce the camera-ready manuscripts they want. In fact, you'll probably sleep with the LaTeX companion, as I have been doing for the last two months...
In short: major hassle.
For collaborations: luckily we tend to be lonely guys and write our own stuff ;-) However if you need to co-operate with word users (as I am doing now), I found it less time consuming to act as "principal editor": you're responsible for the master copy in LyX format, get the (edited) word files and insert the corrections in your copy.
__________________________________________________ Stefano Franchi Department of Philosophy Ph: (64) 9 373-7599 x83940 University Of Auckland Fax: (64) 9 373-7408 Private Bag 92019 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Auckland New Zealand
