Am Dienstag, 17. Februar 2004 16:36 schrieb Ronald Florence:
I've noted in the past that LyX is a frustration in dealing with trade publishers (like Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster) for books intended for the general public. Unlike some scientific publishers, trade publishers do not accept manuscripts in LaTeX, LyX or any format but ms-word or perhaps WordPerfect.
Dear Ronald,
I think that publishers want to format their publications themselves, the author has only to concentrate on the content and deliver a manuscript suitable for say TeX and its children or Framemaker or something else. In my experience publishers are happy with plain text files to feed their formatting-engines. Some jounals accept TeX-source-files, but this is a rare exemption when the formatting of contents is very standardized. The distinction between author and typesetter/printer has worked quite well so far, in general, I believe.
So I am happy to hear that your publisher accepted your formatted proofs, but I would not be disappointed if the publisher did not accept the authors layout-ideas and want to typeset it himself.
Just a side-note - in our first-year courses we produce our own books of readings which are photocopied and bound by the university print shop. Most people just include photocopies of articles or web pages that (at best) they've run through Word, but of course I use LyX (last semester I went over the top, combining all the citations from the various papers into one massive BibTeX file and writing a glossary and index!). While I was explaining how important it was that the odd-numbered pages came out on the right, the guy asked "How come you always give us such clean copy?" "It's not me, it's my software," I replied!
Robin
--
"Telling disgruntled employees that they are always free to leave their jobs seems no different in principle from telling political dissidents that they are free to emigrate."
- Stephen Newman
Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Univeritesi Ankara 06533 Turkey
www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin
