Steve Litt wrote:
On Wednesday 09 May 2007 14:23, Rich Shepard wrote:
On Wed, 9 May 2007, Steve Litt wrote:
Interesting article:
How to Spot a Word Processed Book
What jumps out at me when I look at a processed word book is the uneven
spacing between words on each line. The interletter and interword spacing
on a typeset page is much more subtle and the white space doesn't jump off
the page as a distraction.
Of interest, perhaps, in light of the referenced web page is that
O'Reilly & Associates insist that their authors submit copy in MS Word
format. Considering the support ORA provides to the open source community,
and the prevalent use of TeX/LaTeX/LyX among linux users and writers, that
publisher won't accept camera-ready, typeset copy. A good friend of mine
was frustrated tremendously at having to re-do her book in OO.o to save it
as a .doc file. When I wrote Tim O'Reilly to ask why they have that policy
he never responded.
Hi Rich,
I think I know why they want it in (barf) MS Word.
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.
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.
There is another way:
The majority keeps using word as before. They get a word template
and all the hassles of getting it right in word.
Those who wish to submit camera-ready material (made with
whatever software they like) do that.
They get the typesetting spec:
margins this wide, use that font for text, these fonts for headings,
this amount of space between heading and text - and so on and so on.
I wrote a book this way.
Or alternatively, they could supply a latex class seeing that tex
probably is one of the larger "minority" formats. Might be useful
if they have enough people wanting to use tex. This generally works for
lyx users too.
Helge Hafting
