On May 10, 2007, at 7:31 AM, Daniel Lohmann wrote:
Rich Shepard wrote:
[...]
When I wrote Tim O'Reilly to ask why they have that policy he
never responded.
I guess they do it for pragmatic reasons. It is just the "editor"
that
is most common among writers - and documents are most probably
converted
into an in-house format for the typesetting. (Maybe they even use TeX
internally...)
O'Reilly uses FrameMaker, and one of their principals is on record
likening the possibility of doing another book on TeX (they did Norm
Walsh's _Making TeX Work (available at http://
makingtexwork.sourceforge.net/mtw/ ) ) up with that of their doing a
book on ``wombat sex'' or some such.
Sams uses Quark XPress as does John Wiley & Sons for the most part
(even doing a book on InDesign in Quark). Most people are moving to
InDesign though, the Quark 5, 6 and 7 upgrades have not endeared
Quark to their users, nor has their support or licensing policies.
The best solution I believe would be for LyX to support some
reasonable subset of Word ML at export time and / or for latex2rtf to
be up-dated to support that.
As regards why publishers choose the tools they do, well it's
complicated. I wrote up my take on it on comp.text.tex a while back:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/msg/36401bceced0ee9a
LyX makes for a nice standard input format for working in LaTeX and
the one book which I received from an author who used LyX at a
previous job went off w/o a hitch.
William
--
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
