Steve Litt wrote:
Big publishers like O'Reilly (or in the case of my Samba Unleashed, Sams) take
complete control of the book's layout. Working with a mainstream publisher is
the ultimate WYSIWYM experience -- you as the author are responsible only for
content. Your publisher gives you a list of styles you may (and must) use and
a stylesheet telling how and when to use them. You do that, and the publisher
takes care of the rest.
If the publisher were to accept a LyX document (or LaTeX), they'd either need
to accept the author's layout (bad idea when you publish a uniform series
like Unleashed or Nutshell), or they'd need to translate back into MS Word
with appropriate styles.
Not at all. Some publishers (granted, all I know about are math
journals, which form a biased and tiny subset of publishers) simply
require you to use their specific TeX style files --- which is easy to
do in TeX, and not so bad in LyX either, in fact, some of the Springer
styles (kluwer) are already included in LyX. No reason to translate
into Word. Also, going from one TeX style to another is far easier than
trying to do the same thing in Word.
Another reason they use MS Word is because MS Word has facilities to track
changes, so the chapter documents that keep getting sent back and forth
contain a complete history of queries, reponses and changes.
This is also easy to do in LyX/TeX, but it is also dangerous to keep
such information in a document by default. It can be very embarrassing,
say, in a job offer letter, to be able to see what the original salary
offer was, before upper management cut it by 25%. This may be less of a
problem in this case, but still unwanted information can be transmitted.
Of course, one could ask "why not make LyX the official "wordprocessor"
instead of MS Word, and supply a LyX layout instead of a MS Word style
template. The answer is simply that it's very hard to find willing and
qualified authors for the amount mainstream publishers are willing to pay,
and it would be far easier to get the few LyX/LaTeX users to switch to MS
Word than to get the multitudes of MS Word users to switch to LyX, which many
haven't heard of, don't have, and don't know how to install.
This should be less of a concern for the likes of O'Reilly, who really
do support open source, the antithesis of MS practice.
--
David L. Johnson
Let's be straight here. If we find something we can't understand
we like to call it something you can't understand,
or indeed even pronounce. -- Douglas Adams
