On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 9:36 AM, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com>wrote:
> So, when he comes back and asks that, it would be *wonderful* to give > the writer's list one or more best seller books (I think something with > an Amazon rank of less than 5000 would do it), to refute his statement, > by counterexample. > > I'm willing to bet you won't find such an example. The reason is simple: more or less by definition a best-seller is book produced by a major commercial publishing house supported by a consistent marketing effort, heavily edited by a professional editor and laid out by a (team of ) typesetters according to a carefully designed house-specific graphic design project. The writer is just one element of the whole operation and she must use tools everyone else uses (or tools that produce output everyone else can use and viceversa). That means the writer must use microsoft word or word-compatible software, because that the format the editor will expect, and the doc format is what the typesetter wants when the text is inputted into InDesign. LyX just does not fit that scenario---unless everyone else moves to LyX and the typesetters switch to LaTeX. It's not going to happen. The exception is scientific publishing (Springer comes to mind), where, until not too long ago, many publishers had embraced Latex typesetting, and therefore made fitting LyX into their process relatively easy. But if by "best-sellers" you mean the kind of books listed on the NYTimes, then I'm afraid LyX won't have much of a chance. Then again, I'm a pessimist by nature. Cheers, Stefano -- __________________________________________________ Stefano Franchi Associate Research Professor Department of Hispanic Studies Ph: +1 (979) 845-2125 Texas A&M University Fax: +1 (979) 845-6421 College Station, Texas, USA stef...@tamu.edu http://stefano.cleinias.org
