OK, so I've almost finished writing an entire book with groff. Nothing fancy involved: no equations or pictures, but LOTS of footnotes and refer tags. I'm 2 weeks away from submitting the manuscript, and have just let the editor know that I can send him pdfs, and gnu troff source files -- or, if those really won't fly, very simply formatted HTML files; to which he replies:
"GNU troff?? What is that? These days the publishers really want either MSWord or TEX files. We can try the HTML result, but I predict lots of issues in the typesetting! You'll be correcting proofs for weeks. My approach in the past, when publishing articles written in groff, was to submit the pdf to the journal, who sent it out to peer review; then, when they requested the Word file, as they inevitably did at these humanities journals, I (1) extracted all the footnotes from the groff source into a separate file, using a simple shell script; (2) ran each file -- the footnoteless text and the footnote file -- through groff and preprocessors, with HTML output; (3) opened the two HTML files in OpenOffice and saved them to .doc format; and (4) [and this is the real killer] hand cut and pasted each footnote back into the body-text file at the correct place, reading off a printout of the pdf. Steps 1-3 took 5 minutes; for my last article, step 4 was 1-2 hours work. But I have more than a thousand footnotes in the book, so this workflow doesn't seem feasible this time. So, does anyone have an easy solution? Either to improve this workflow, or to use an entirely different one that I haven't considered? Any help gratefully and desperately received!! (This whole situation is not helped by the fact that my wife has asked me *several* times over the last couple of years: "why are you using that silly wordprocessor? are you *sure* that the publishers will know what to do with it?" I predict a rash of "I told you so"s tonight...) Robert.
