On Mar 4, 2005, at 12:32 AM, Rich Shepard wrote:
One of publishing's great mysteries -- to me, at least -- is why O'Reilly &
Associates insist that their authors submit manuscripts in Word format. I
know several authors who work strictly in linux and despise having to use
OO.o then translate to .doc for submittal. Considering that ORA is known as
the publisher of the best linux/UNIX books on the market, their refusal to
accept LaTeX is puzzline. And, the company is a major sponsor of OSCON, the
Open Source Convention (held here in Portland the past couple of years), but
they insist on the proprietary Word format. I sent Tim O'Reilly an e-mail
asking about this but he has not responded. Shrug.
Most of O'Reilly's books are done in Framemaker. I expect all of their copy editors use Word and that as a whole they use the ``track changes'' feature in Word.
They did do one book on TeX, Norman Walsh's _Making TeX work_ (and may've been put out that they didn't get some TeX books they wanted early on) but have since been said to've likened it to ``wombat sex'' for its obscurity. You can find MTW on sourceforge, but it really wants updating.
Unfortunately, for the most part publishers perceive it as more
cost-effective and more flexible for most jobs to convert to Word or plain
text and re-typeset from scratch. (In particular, doing this allows them to
grab pretty much any graphic designer off the street to work on it.)
Why is this, in your opinion? Are they oblivious of TeX?
A few observations and thoughts:
TeX is viewed as a special-purpose tool for typesetting (academic) math.
Colleges don't teach it in their graphic design curricula, and many graphic design professors have never heard of it, and companies in the printing field get very few resumes which mention TeX (at my day job mine was the first in a six month plus search). It's hard for publishers to consistently find people to consistently do work in TeX, so it's seen as a risk.
Publishers mislike sinking largish amounts of time / money into one-off macro formats.
William
-- William Adams, publishing specialist voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708 www.atlis.com
