Stefano Franchi wrote:
Yes. In my field---Humanities---this is the almost universal rule. The
"academically serious publishers" (i.e. those you need to publish with
to get tenure ;-) ) want complete control and use MS Word as an
editing format which they will input, typically, into InDesign (used
to be Quark Xpress, but we know the story). Some of the most
established publishers will even take this approach a step further and
actually retype the whole book from the typescript, as it was done
decades ago. They claim it is actually cheaper to use someone in India
to retype it than to pay someone in the US to spot hidden problems in
the word processing file. (I had personal experience with this
approach, I am not kidding).
Well, if they *retype*, then they surely don't need a ms word file.
a PDF works just as well, or even typwritten manuscript. . .
Similar situation with Humanities journals--Word is now required for
exactly the same reason. Now that I completely switched to LyX (I used
to be a Framemaker user, and FrameMaker has a more than decent FM-> MS
Word capabilities), I have to go through the unpleasant experience of
converting back to Word (through the OO route) before submitting.
Exporting to text and reimporting into Word is not really an option
because you lose all the basic formatting that actually conveys
important semantic information---from emphasis to footnotes to
sectioning, etcetera.
In my case---Humanities, again---the real solution would be a minimal
LyX MS Word export function that preserved the most essential,
content-bound formatting of the document: footnote/endnotes, emphasis,
headings, etc.
Of course, one could ask "why not make LyX the official "wordprocessor"
instead of MS Word, and supply a LyX layout instead of a MS Word style
template. The answer is simply that it's very hard to find willing and
qualified authors for the amount mainstream publishers are willing to
pay,
and it would be far easier to get the few LyX/LaTeX users to switch
to MS
Word than to get the multitudes of MS Word users to switch to LyX,
which many
haven't heard of, don't have, and don't know how to install.
Exactly. The vast majority of my colleagues are not even aware that
there is a category difference between "word processor" and "MS Word."
The tend to think there is no difference between the two terms and
could not care less for an explanation of such difference.
Yuck - what an attitude! If they don't care about an explanation, just send
them some LyX files. When they complain, show that "they
open fine here!" :-(
Helge Hafting
