> Word has several auto-correct features which productive programmers > in any language should disable, if they do not avoid the product entirely. > Smart quotes is one of them.
About 3 days out of 4, I'd agree with you. Can I just interject here: there is no problem with the typesetting task if the typesetter originates all the material. And before anyone else says DocBooks again, or LaTeX -- for years now Vector has not used MSWord to produce camera copy. This has been done from source material in HTML to generate PDF by a homebrew system. See: http://www.vector.org.uk/archive/v231/clark.htm Substituting XML for HTML, that's not a million miles from DocBooks, which future editions of Vector might well use. Speaking for myself, I have to trawl the Vector archives for my source material. By then MSWord, in all its back-versions, has long done its worst. When it comes to submitting copy to Lulu.com (which I've done over 20 times now, in different ways, in a rapidly changing environment), by far the most docile way it works is with camera copy set up in MSWord. It is -- dare I say it -- WYSIWYG. Going from DOC to PDF is one step that so far has never let me down. The only step IME. That counts for a lot in my game. So "avoiding MSWord entirely" is for people with clean earth to till. Ian On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 11:12 PM, Ian Clark <[email protected]> > wrote: >> However the typesetter's job entails identifying and checking code and >> verifying it hasn't been munged, eg smart-quoted. Somehow MS Word >> seems capable of munging J code a lot. I don't know what causes it >> (copy/paste? Import from HTML?) but I know what it hits: instances of >> <: and <. which can truncate whole phrases. > > Word has several auto-correct features which productive programmers > in any language should disable, if they do not avoid the product entirely. > > Smart quotes is one of them. > > -- > Raul > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
