Dealing with publishers
bosse
LaTeX
with tables, figures etc. This has now been processed by a
profesional
publisher and we have got back a very strange LaTeX source text which
we do
not manage to compile ourselves. The typesetter has provided us with
a lot
of .sty and other files but it still does not compile. We would like
to be able to
change a few things ourselves before the book is printed but it seems
impossble.
In particular the pagination seems a big problem and it seems that the
typesetter
compiles each chapter separately and then updates manually the table
of
contents and other crossreferences.
I would like to know if this is standard procedure for book publishing
or if we should
be firmer in obtaining a useful source LaTeX files.
Bosse
co...@zedat.fu-berlin.de
: Together with two co-authors we have written a book using rather plain
: LaTeX
: with tables, figures etc.
: This has now been processed by a
: profesional
: publisher and we have got back a very strange LaTeX source text which
: we do
: not manage to compile ourselves.
Does this mean you sent your uncompiled .tex source file there?
The typesetter has provided us with
: a lot
: of .sty and other files but it still does not compile.
The .log file of your compilation attempt is the prime source of information
about the failing compilation. Many reasons are thinkable, but you've to
check yourself for:
- gross deviations of LaTeX versions or package versions
- uncommunicated assumptions of certain style files, fonts etc.
- uncommunicated choices of character encoding
- misplaced style files
etc.
Most of these problems are quite simple to track but you should really
make an attempt of doing so.
: In particular the pagination seems a big problem and it seems that the
: typesetter
: compiles each chapter separately and then updates manually the table
: of
: contents and other crossreferences.
Strange procedure. While possible in theory, it rather looks like the
failure to redefine the correct starting page number. Are you sure you
and your publisher talk about the same typesetting system?
: I would like to know if this is standard procedure for book publishing
: or if we should
: be firmer in obtaining a useful source LaTeX files.
The standard procedure, if any, is,
- discuss all publication-related issues with your publisher long before
you hand in your manuscript;
- obtain all style files required by your publisher as early as possible;
- test-compile a minimal document meeting your publisher's specifications;
- use LaTeX or whatever, but hand in a PDF. Many publishers will prefer
a PDF to a raw LaTeX file with unsolved compilation and formatting issues,
and will even require a print-out on paper to be submitted in addition.
Oliver.
--
Dr. Oliver Corff e-mail: co...@zedat.fu-berlin.de
bosse
> bosse <b...@mse.kth.se> wrote:
.
We provided our LaTeX source, we are not professional enough with
LaTeX to provide the layout the publisher wanted and the typesetter
has not provided us with all fonts for example, evidently he uses a
font
called default which is not easy to find.
> : In particular the pagination seems a big problem and it seems that the
> : typesetter
> : compiles each chapter separately and then updates manually the table
> : of
> : contents and other crossreferences.
>
> Strange procedure. While possible in theory, it rather looks like the
> failure to redefine the correct starting page number. Are you sure you
> and your publisher talk about the same typesetting system?
The book starts with pages i to x and the comes page 1 to whatever
but I think that is supported with standard LaTeX book layout. The
publishers are not very professional with LaTeX either and the
typesetter
is wellknown and he claims to use LaTeX2e.
> : I would like to know if this is standard procedure for book publishing
> : or if we should
> : be firmer in obtaining a useful source LaTeX files.
>
> The standard procedure, if any, is,
> - discuss all publication-related issues with your publisher long before
> you hand in your manuscript;
> - obtain all style files required by your publisher as early as possible;
> - test-compile a minimal document meeting your publisher's specifications;
> - use LaTeX or whatever, but hand in a PDF. Many publishers will prefer
> a PDF to a raw LaTeX file with unsolved compilation and formatting issues,
> and will even require a print-out on paper to be submitted in addition.
I will try this next time ... or if the there will be a new edition.
A colleague
published a book there earlier but he provided a Word file which had
to
be retyped by the typesetter.
Thanks to convince me that the procedure is not standard.
Lars Madsen
maybe there is a job opportunity there, for someone that actually do
know LaTeX ;-) and can program LaTeX such that it is readable by others ;-)
/daleif
blm...@myrealbox.com
I can report about the experience of some people I know who published
a book a few years ago, with the typesetting done in LaTeX.
They sent the publisher full LaTeX source (using a LaTeX template
provided by the publisher), EPS files for the diagrams, and
hardcopy of -- I think both the whole book and the individual
diagrams.
They were told that further processing and typesetting would
be done in LaTeX. "Processing" here was a somewhat complicated
multi-step process involving copyediting and more than one round of
proofs for the authors to correct. At no time during the process
were the authors given updated LaTeX source, only hardcopy (with
sometimes PDF by e-mail, when fast turnaround was needed).
Warning: Long and and somewhat tangential paragraphs ahead.
Wrap-up at the end:
Updates to the LaTeX source were done by a company in India.
(Authors and publisher were in the US, geographically
dispersed.) Interaction between the authors and the
LaTeX people was all channeled through a book production
specialist/coordinator hired by the publisher. The book
production specialist apparently knew nothing about LaTeX,
though she assured the authors that her company produced books
with LaTeX all the time. It was not always clear during the
production process whether the LaTeX people were doing things
in the "right" way for LaTeX:
Corrections to bibliography entries were done by updating
the .bbl file rather than the (submitted) BibTeX source.
The index .... I suspect the authors still have bad memories
about that. They had submitted source indexed using LaTeX's
indexing facilities. The publishers hired a professional
indexer (not unreasonable -- perhaps indexing requires
skills most authors don't have), who .... It was never
made clear what tools were used, but the final index given
to the publishers was a Microsoft Word file. It had many
errors and omissions. This index was given (in hardcopy
form) to the authors for comment very late in the process.
It had many errors and omissions, mostly resulting from
the indexer's apparent lack of familiarity with the subject
matter. The authors felt that the right approach to fixing
this was to merge the indexer's additions and changes (the
acceptable ones anyway) into the LaTeX source and regenerate
the automatically-produced index. This was said to be
impossible given the time constraints, so the authors spent
some frantic days manually comparing their index with that
produced by the indexer's and making changes in the Word file.
Wrap-up:
After completion of the production process, the authors
were given copies of updated LaTeX source and EPS files,
plus assorted style and template files. The source did not
compile because not all needed files were present. The authors
complained to the publisher and received additional files,
but never enough to get a clean compile. At least some of
the files that were never supplied were fonts, so possibly
supplying them would have been a copyright violation.
The authors had hoped they would receive back something from
which they could easily generate an updated edition if that
was ever desirable. No such luck, apparently: Even if a clean
compile were possible, the result would not match the published
book because of how changes to the index were made. And then
there's the matter of the BibTeX source file being out of date.
The way I heard the story, the last stages of the process were
a huge mess and left the authors with some hard feelings.
I have not kept up with the aftermath, but I think at this
point they might say that it *was* a huge mess, but it was
really not clear what had gone wrong and whose fault it was,
if anyone's. In fairness it must be said that they praised
some aspects of the production process too.
The moral of the story for authors is probably to try to
nail down, as early as possible, the details of how what they
submit will be turned into a finished product.
--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
thomas.nos...@uni-bonn.de
> The moral of the story for authors is probably to try to nail
> down, as early as possible, the details of how what they submit
> will be turned into a finished product.
Amen to that. I have heard of one example where authors submitted
a LaTeX source + pdf. The publisher had the pdf printed and sent
the hard copy to subcontractors in India who retyped the whole
shebang in -- drumroll -- LaTeX. Needless to say, the result was a
humongous mess and unpleasant for all parties implied.
I'm not sure there really is a standard procedure, this is why
it's so important to negotiate and agree on all relevant details
first. I just had a very pleasant experience: I'm publishing a
book (humanities) with a British publisher. The manuscript was
written in ConTeXt. They knew nothing about ConTeXt, so we agreed
I would send them pdfs to their requirements (they were fairly
liberal about the style); the entire copy-editing process was done
on these pdfs, and I edited my source files myself. It's a
trade-off: this represented some additional work for me, but at
least I was in control of the entire process. I always knew that
nobody was going to introduce additional errors into what I had
already produced. Publishers usually have their own idea of a
workflow (which, depressingly, most often involves Word files),
but I found it relatively easy to convince them to depart from
their usual procedures.
Just my 2 cents.
Thomas
co...@zedat.fu-berlin.de
: > The moral of the story for authors is probably to try to nail
: > will be turned into a finished product.
: I'm not sure there really is a standard procedure, this is why
: it's so important to negotiate and agree on all relevant details
: first.
And Amen to that, too.
: liberal about the style); the entire copy-editing process was done
: on these pdfs, and I edited my source files myself. It's a
: trade-off: this represented some additional work for me, but at
: least I was in control of the entire process. I always knew that
: nobody was going to introduce additional errors into what I had
: already produced. Publishers usually have their own idea of a
: workflow (which, depressingly, most often involves Word files),
: but I found it relatively easy to convince them to depart from
: their usual procedures.
I just finished a book which is to be published by one of the most
prestigeous publishing houses in my field. The production team
there had _no problem at all_ (read: were wonderfully cooperative)
in discussing with me the technical side of the book. After sending
in an initial typesetting experiment by PDF, I received, by fax,
their manual annotations and comments written on the printout, and,
via email, I also received a detailed list of their style requirements
(text block sizes, footnote ruler lengths, footnote styles, etc.)
I implemented everything in a preamble file independent of the
source text of my book, sent them the result (again as PDF), they
indicated which point was not done to their satisfaction (which I
perfectly understood and accepted as the publisher's corporate identity
is as well a sales driver for my book), and after two or three
exchanges of this kind the appearance part of the book was done.
This happened about half a year before the proposed submission date,
with ample of time to correct further glitches (which did not occur,
though).
Result: The publisher had the feeling to be in control of the process,
and I had the same feeling, too. For the major part of the last half
year, I could fully concentrate on last addenda and corrections,
without any threat of a third party ruining everything created so far.
This is the occasion to express my gratitude here to many contributors
here who have kindly helped me with many issues. I mentioned this
in the preface to my book, too, together with a short reference to
the software used (I used memoir).
Oliver.
PS: The production manager of the publisher told me that only a small
fraction of books they publish are typeset in LaTeX, but this sounded
very much like a factual statement, without carrying any positive or
negative undertone.
blst...@bellsouth.net
>blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> writes:
>
>> The moral of the story for authors is probably to try to nail
>> down, as early as possible, the details of how what they submit
>> will be turned into a finished product.
>
>written in ConTeXt. They knew nothing about ConTeXt, so we agreed
>I would send them pdfs to their requirements (they were fairly
>liberal about the style); the entire copy-editing process was done
>on these pdfs, and I edited my source files myself.
In reading all the horror stories, I was just about
to post saying that I seem to have come out lucky.
And then Thomas reports on an arrangement much like
my own. I send them PDFs. They use Acrobat to add
comments, and I take those comments and update the
LaTeX source files. We've already gone through a
process of sending them a couple of chapters that
they then ran by their printers and through some
sort of a PDF validation process. There were a
couple of warnings that came out of that, and I need
to see if they're going to be an issue, but so far
it looks like it's going to work pretty well. Now,
earlier on, every time they'd add another person
to the project, I'd have to go through the whole
"in the beginning we agreed that I'd send a big PDF
at the end" thing. But everyone seems to have come
to terms with it, and it seems to be working well.
BLS
blm...@myrealbox.com
<blst...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> thomas.nos...@uni-bonn.de wrote:
> >blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> writes:
> >
> >> The moral of the story for authors is probably to try to nail
> >> down, as early as possible, the details of how what they submit
> >> will be turned into a finished product.
> >
> > The manuscript was
> >written in ConTeXt. They knew nothing about ConTeXt, so we agreed
> >I would send them pdfs to their requirements (they were fairly
> >liberal about the style); the entire copy-editing process was done
> >on these pdfs, and I edited my source files myself.
>
> In reading all the horror stories, I was just about
> to post saying that I seem to have come out lucky.
> And then Thomas reports on an arrangement much like
> my own.
[ snip non-horror story ]
As one of those posting a (second-hand) horror story, I'll add
that it's very, very reassuring to hear not one but several
reports that things *can* go well.
I'll add to my story that I heard from one of the authors
of the did-not-go-smoothly book that she corresponded with
someone planning to do a book with the same publisher and also
using LaTeX, and guided by her experience the second group was
able to arrange something much more satisfactory. Sorry to
be so vague, but again, I feel like I shouldn't give away any
identifying information. But I thought it might be interesting
to note that two different author teams working with the
same publisher could have markedly different experiences,
partly because one group knew the potential pitfalls.
William F. Adams
changes to the preamble to moving all the author thing which I have
better alternatives for to one package file, adding a second package
file where all new commands which I add for tweaking are defined as
new blank commands, then a third file where commands are renewcommand-
defined to what I need them to be.
Then, returning the file to the author is a matter of commenting out
the third package line (or providing an empty copy).
William
Jeffrey J Weimer
"William F. Adams" <will...@aol.com> wrote:
> When I work on this sort of project, my preference is to limit my
>....
> Then, returning the file to the author is a matter of commenting out
> the third package line (or providing an empty copy).
I think I understand what you are doing???? To be sure, do you mean that
you SUBSTITUTE the publishers commands with your own up until the time
of submission ...
\input{thePublishersCommands}
\input{MySUBSTITUTECommandsBlank}
\input{MySUBSTITUTERenewCommands}
... or that you KEEP the publishers commands throughout and just define
your own specific commands ...
\input{thePublishersCommands}
\input{MyNEWCommandsBlank}
\input{MyNEWRenewCommands}
I ask because, in the former case, during your runs up to submission, I
think you would be commenting out the first line, while at submission,
you would comment out the third AND second line. By comparison, in the
latter case, all lines remain during your runs up to submission. At
submission, you would comment out the third line, expecting the
publisher to have his/her commands to replace your own.
Thanks.
--
JJW
William F. Adams
my rôle --- at my previous job I worked as a compositor, so received
author files, composed them according to a book designer's layout /
specs so that they could be printed, then returned the file to the
author if requested.
William
Jeffrey J Weimer
"William F. Adams" <will...@aol.com> wrote:
Ah! Yes! Thank you!
--
JJW
Luis Rivera
fail, started working on TeX precisely because he didn't like the
proofs sent by his publisher. What strikes me as remarkable in this
thread is the sense that some publishers still seem to have little or
no interest into processing LaTeX source or using TeX as their
typesetter.
One problem I sense as a publisher is perhaps the counterpart of some
horror stories told here: authors with LaTeX experience have a natural
tendency to develop their own packages (extra command definitions,
shortcut macros, BibTeX and Makeindex styles, etc.), which later on
may cause trouble for the publisher. That's why here at work we
encourage contributors to send their papers in some reasonably open
format (RTF or ODF lately), so that we can work on conversions from
those files; or else to stick to the standard classes (report and
article, mostly) and styles (BibTeX's plain or natbib, for instance),
or else to surrender their custom-made packages, to prevent them in
any way from accidentally shooting our feet. Sounds mean, but
otherwise the mess in the publisher's side. Perhaps the best practice
is that of those publishers who share blueprints of their stylesheets
with potential contributors.
Is there any discussion in some local users group about setting
guidelines for author/publisher exchanges, or is it rather a matter of
luck?
Cheers,
Luis.
William F. Adams
tools from a compositor's viewpoint:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/msg/36401bceced0ee9a?dmode=source
It's hard to find people w/ TeX experience to do composition and
they're more likely to have this skill as part of an avocation as
opposed to it being their vocation, so are harder to keep (in terms of
employment).
William
AES
"William F. Adams" <will...@aol.com> wrote:
A summary of how I prepared what was perhaps the very first large
professionally published technical book ever composed and typeset
entirely in (Plain) TeX, and how I dealt with its publisher, is given in
an early TUGBoat article available at
<http://www.stanford.edu/~siegman/How_I_wrote_LASERS.pdf>
[It's still selling steadily.]
Dr Engelbert Buxbaum
> or else to stick to the standard classes (report and
> article, mostly) and styles (BibTeX's plain or natbib, for instance),
> or else to surrender their custom-made packages, to prevent them in
> any way from accidentally shooting our feet.
Then why not publish your own style-file (or even document class). Several
large publishers, including my own, do that. All I had to do is to add a
little bit of limbo with semantic markup commands like \Name, \Tensor and
the like to ensure uniform (and easily changeable) typsetting of such
items.
For exchange of files we used ftp to/from a special directory of the
publishers internet server, which made for quick and cheap information
exchange (imagine the costs of sending a 400 page manuscript by
international courier back and forth several times).
By and large the publisher could use my source files directly. The only
changes required were to bring some of the colour diagrams together, so
that not the entire book had to be printed in 4 colours. I also requested
some minor changes to the publishers house style (so that in a description
environment the titles come out bold, as in the standard classes, rather
than in normal font).
The copy editor apparently knows little about LaTeX, for example he asked
me to redo the index after the pictures were moved. He was very surprised
to learn that that required only a re-run of LaTeX and makeindex on the
existing sources! But there are TeXnicians in the production department.
So in summary I think that LaTeX is a very suitable method for manuscript
preparation, provided everybody knows what they are doing.
William F. Adams
> A summary of how I prepared what was perhaps the very first large
> professionally published technical book ever composed and typeset
> entirely in (Plain) TeX, and how I dealt with its publisher, is given in
> an early TUGBoat article available at
>
> <http://www.stanford.edu/~siegman/How_I_wrote_LASERS.pdf>
Neat!
(It's also available at: http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb08-1/tb17siegman.pdf
as part of the TUGboat archives).
Interesting how much (and how little) things have changed.
David Walden had an interesting article in the on-line Practical TeX
Journal with the contemporary view on using LaTeX recently.
> [It's still selling steadily.]
A fitting tribute to your hard work and that of the people who
assisted you (which reads like a ``who's who'' of the TeX world).
William
AES
"William F. Adams" <will...@aol.com> wrote:
> http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb08-1/tb17siegman.pdf
Thanks for kind words . . .
[Just as a historical note: It helped to know Don Knuth as a faculty
colleague, and have my wife working as manager of an early Stanford
time-shared DEC-20 machine called "Context", which did nothing but
deliver a line-oriented text editor (Wylbur? -- or was it Pentti (sp?)
Kanerva's TVEdit?) and an early implementation of TeX to campus ADM-3s
and the like over (ABIR) 300 or 1200 baud modems.]
[Actually sat just behind Don Knuth yesterday at a Stanford Historical
Society sponsored event (live interview with one of Stanford's past
presidents). He asked a very perceptive question about library policies
during this individual's tenure, and chatted at the reception afterward.]
Luis Rivera
> On May 3, 10:28 am, AES <sieg...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > A summary of how I prepared what was perhaps the very first large
> > professionally published technical book ever composed and typeset
> > entirely in (Plain) TeX, and how I dealt with its publisher, is given in
> > an early TUGBoat article available at
>
> > <http://www.stanford.edu/~siegman/How_I_wrote_LASERS.pdf>
>
> Neat!
>
> (It's also available at:http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb08-1/tb17siegman.pdf
> as part of the TUGboat archives).
>
> Interesting how much (and how little) things have changed.
>
> David Walden had an interesting article in the on-line Practical TeX
> Journal with the contemporary view on using LaTeX recently.
>
Great! These two references are pretty much what I was thinking about.
Thanks!
Luis.
Luis Rivera
<engelbert_buxb...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Am 02.05.2007, 16:50 Uhr, schrieb Luis Rivera <jlr...@gmail.com>:
>
> > or else to stick to the standard classes (report and
> > article, mostly) and styles (BibTeX's plain or natbib, for instance),
> > or else to surrender their custom-made packages, to prevent them in
> > any way from accidentally shooting our feet.
>
> Then why not publish your own style-file (or even document class). Several
> large publishers, including my own, do that. All I had to do is to add a
> little bit of limbo with semantic markup commands like \Name, \Tensor and
> the like to ensure uniform (and easily changeable) typsetting of such
> items.
>
Exactly as I said: distributing blueprints of the stylesheets with
macros for authors, so that the contributors may just fill all the
blanks. We have no need to do that right away, as we use the standard
classes (article,mostly) with their macros at the lower level; if
things get more complicated, I guess we'll have to post or email
blueprints...
I meant the other way around: some mid-level to advanced user
(re)define macros extensively, which may actually clash with what you
as book designer/typesetter do to prepare the final printouts. A good
practice is to include these redefinitions in the preamble, but
sometimes they forget to do it. That's no big deal, for there are
packages to include these macros on a selective basis, but the
potential for trouble still lurks there...
> So in summary I think that LaTeX is a very suitable method for manuscript
> preparation, provided everybody knows what they are doing.
In a way my comment was headed in this direction: IMO, the best way to
go, if using (La)TeX, would be to get in touch directly with the
production people (the actual book designer or typesetter), as you
said you did, to minimize the surprise factor.
Cheers,
Luis.
blm...@myrealbox.com
Luis Rivera <jlr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem seems to go back to DEK himself, who, if memory doesn't
> fail, started working on TeX precisely because he didn't like the
> proofs sent by his publisher. What strikes me as remarkable in this
> thread is the sense that some publishers still seem to have little or
> no interest into processing LaTeX source or using TeX as their
> typesetter.
>
> One problem I sense as a publisher is perhaps the counterpart of some
> horror stories told here: authors with LaTeX experience have a natural
> tendency to develop their own packages (extra command definitions,
> shortcut macros, BibTeX and Makeindex styles, etc.), which later on
> may cause trouble for the publisher. That's why here at work we
> encourage contributors to send their papers in some reasonably open
> format (RTF or ODF lately), so that we can work on conversions from
> those files;
As someone who contributed one of those horror stories, I wondered
about publishers and whether they also had tales to tell. I guess so!
About having people send you things in an open format .... Maybe
I just don't know enough about RTF, but I had the idea that it wasn't
really capable of expressing the kind of logical markup that LaTeX
is so good at, and so going this route would reduce everything to
WYSIAYG. I guess for simple documents that could be okay, but for
something with a lot of references, or an index, it seems like the
wrong approach. Maybe in that case you ask for things in ODF,
about which I know even less but sounds potentially more capable
of including internal structure.
More in response to another of your posts downthread.
> or else to stick to the standard classes (report and
> article, mostly) and styles (BibTeX's plain or natbib, for instance),
> or else to surrender their custom-made packages, to prevent them in
> any way from accidentally shooting our feet. Sounds mean, but
> otherwise the mess in the publisher's side. Perhaps the best practice
> is that of those publishers who share blueprints of their stylesheets
> with potential contributors.
>
> Is there any discussion in some local users group about setting
> guidelines for author/publisher exchanges, or is it rather a matter of
> luck?
--
blm...@myrealbox.com
Well .... I can easily believe that people who know enough
LaTeX to make use of its macro-definition facilities can make
a mess! But ....
A few more details about the horror story I related upthread:
The authors, aware that they were not experts in knowing how to
make a book look good, tried to deliver a manuscript with an
internal structure that would make it easy for the publishers
to override their (the authors') typesetting decisions.
They used standard macros where that seemed appropriate --
e.g., for sectioning. However, where there didn't seem to
be standard macros to express a desired logical structure,
they invented their own. All such macros were collected in
a single place into a "authors' macros" file \input'd into
the main document and commented at least a little to indicate
their purpose.
Example: The book include numerous examples of "design
patterns". The authors wanted to typeset names of these
patterns consistently, in a way that would set them off from
running text. Rather than making the choice themselves and
writing, e.g., \textit{Some Pattern}, they defined their own
macro and wrote \AuthorMacro{Some Pattern}, thinking that if
the publisher wanted, say, small caps rather than italics,
this choice could be made by changing one line in one place,
without affecting other italicized text.
They never found out whether this effort to make good use
of LaTeX's ability to express internal structure was a help
or a hindrance, or even noticed. Any comments from your
perspective on the other side of the author/publisher divide?
> > So in summary I think that LaTeX is a very suitable method for manuscript
> > preparation, provided everybody knows what they are doing.
>
> In a way my comment was headed in this direction: IMO, the best way to
> go, if using (La)TeX, would be to get in touch directly with the
> production people (the actual book designer or typesetter), as you
> said you did, to minimize the surprise factor.
There seems to be agreement about this at least!
Luis Rivera
Well, apparently the authors did the Right Thing; I would recommend
this kind of approach myself. If I were typesetting that piece, I'd
appreciate the effort. As for the typesetters themselves, I don't know
what they did, so what can I say? :-)
Luis.
Peter Flynn
> In article <1178139029....@y80g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
> Luis Rivera <jlr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The problem seems to go back to DEK himself, who, if memory doesn't
>> fail, started working on TeX precisely because he didn't like the
>> proofs sent by his publisher. What strikes me as remarkable in this
>> thread is the sense that some publishers still seem to have little or
>> no interest into processing LaTeX source or using TeX as their
>> typesetter.
None whatsoever. They've been frightened off [La]TeX forever by the
grotesque rubbish they were sent when they first tried it.
>> One problem I sense as a publisher is perhaps the counterpart of some
>> horror stories told here: authors with LaTeX experience have a natural
>> tendency to develop their own packages (extra command definitions,
>> shortcut macros, BibTeX and Makeindex styles, etc.), which later on
>> may cause trouble for the publisher.
Exactly. I identified this as the major cause of dissonance between
TeXophiles and publishers in my paper at the TUG meeting in Delaware:
...the training technique known as ‘sitting by Daisy’continues to
predominate.
This comes to a head not in the production of private or internal
documents but in the submission of LaTeX files to publishers. Although
many of them have used LaTeX for years, most would claim that it is
only because of pressure from authors who insist on supplying it. Few
publishers now employ LaTeX experts to undertake the syntactical
correction of LaTeX files necessitated by the authors’
misunderstandings, and some even find it more profitable to print out
an author’s document with errors and have the entire thing retyped
from scratch in Word by keyboarding companies in the Far East.
Most of the publishers’ misconceptions (‘LaTeX has only one font’,
‘LaTeX can’t do graphics’, ‘LaTeX is only for mathematics’, et cetera
ad nauseam) stem from their experience of authors’ own misconceptions
and lack of training. [TUGboat 22:3]
>> That's why here at work we encourage contributors to send their
>> papers in some reasonably open format (RTF or ODF lately), so that
>> we can work on conversions from those files;
>
> As someone who contributed one of those horror stories, I wondered
> about publishers and whether they also had tales to tell. I guess so!
>
> About having people send you things in an open format .... Maybe
> I just don't know enough about RTF, but I had the idea that it wasn't
> really capable of expressing the kind of logical markup that LaTeX
> is so good at, and so going this route would reduce everything to
> WYSIAYG. I guess for simple documents that could be okay, but for
> something with a lot of references, or an index, it seems like the
> wrong approach.
It's actually cheaper to rekey the whole document from scratch, or to
hand-edit RTF or Word into shape, than to edit out the errors and
misunderstandings in authors' [La]TeX sources.
> Maybe in that case you ask for things in ODF, about which I know even
> less but sounds potentially more capable of including internal
> structure.
Publishers couldn't give a tinker's fart about structure. Their job is
to get the book out the door and onto the shelves, and so long as they
think it looks right, they're satisfied. The typesetting houses they
employ are sometimes asked to return XML with the PDFs or film they
create, so that there is a marginally well-formed document in the
archives representing what was published, but it hasn't yet dawned on
the publishers that there is added value to be got from having the
document in a sensible format.
///Peter
Luis Rivera
>
> About having people send you things in an open format .... Maybe
> I just don't know enough about RTF, but I had the idea that it wasn't
> really capable of expressing the kind of logical markup that LaTeX
> is so good at, and so going this route would reduce everything to
> WYSIAYG. I guess for simple documents that could be okay, but for
> something with a lot of references, or an index, it seems like the
> wrong approach. Maybe in that case you ask for things in ODF,
> about which I know even less but sounds potentially more capable
> of including internal structure.
>
The RTF/ODF approach is a bit of a compromise: you're right, they're
not the best medium to render internal structure, specially because
WPs encourage visual over logical markup. Some contributors don't even
know they can automatize some tasks in their WPs (like tables of
contents or indexes), or how to use paragraph styles. So we massage
the texts a little (adding some sort of structure right on the WP),
and then make the conversions. Some manual tinkering is still needed,
but nothing as hard as trying to teach old dogs new tricks.
Luis.
William F. Adams
> Publishers couldn't give a tinker's fart about structure. Their job is
> to get the book out the door and onto the shelves, and so long as they
> think it looks right, they're satisfied. The typesetting houses they
> employ are sometimes asked to return XML with the PDFs or film they
> create, so that there is a marginally well-formed document in the
> archives representing what was published, but it hasn't yet dawned on
> the publishers that there is added value to be got from having the
> document in a sensible format.
The irony of course here is that established working habits not only
go against a proper structuring of a job, but are written into formats
which should be wholly focused on a formal structure, thus negating
any sort of usage beyond merely re-running the job.
A classic example of this is the brain-dead, traditional filenaming
convention of f<chapter>-<figurenumber>.<file_extension> --- so that
next edition, when one adds a figure at the beginning of chapter 13,
_every_ figure in chapter 13 has to not only be re-named, but also _re-
linked_ (and if one misses on, you get a duplicate figure).
Moreover, said naming convention precludes re-using the figure graphic
in a different project w/o re-naming it (unless of course, it just so
happens to coincidentally be used in exactly the same chapter number,
as exactly the same figure number).
William
Luis Rivera
>
> It's actually cheaper to rekey the whole document from scratch, or to
> hand-edit RTF or Word into shape, than to edit out the errors and
> misunderstandings in authors' [La]TeX sources.
>
Agreed! To most users the very thought of having to get outside some
well known WP gives them the creeps. So we keep them easy simply
teaching them to save their work in RTF/ODF.
I've had a better experience with LyX source: for one thing, the GUI
"enforces" users to use a fairly limited subset of LaTeX, and ERT
("evil red text" in LyX jargon, i.e. verbatim [La]TeX code) is far
more controlled this way. The few brave authors who have tried have
been pretty happy with the results, and I haven't had too much bad
time trying to figure out what they've done. Still, LaTeX/LyX
submissions are still pretty rare in the humanities; so, as you said,
"massaging" RTF documents is the shortest path to have clean source
code to start with...
Luis.
Peter Flynn
[...]
> A classic example of this is the brain-dead, traditional filenaming
> convention of f<chapter>-<figurenumber>.<file_extension> --- so that
> next edition, when one adds a figure at the beginning of chapter 13,
> _every_ figure in chapter 13 has to not only be re-named, but also _re-
> linked_ (and if one misses on, you get a duplicate figure).
>
> Moreover, said naming convention precludes re-using the figure graphic
> in a different project w/o re-naming it (unless of course, it just so
> happens to coincidentally be used in exactly the same chapter number,
> as exactly the same figure number).
Which, incidentally, gave rise one of the biggest complaints in the
publishers' XML session at Extreme Markup last year: that XML muddied
the waters unnecessarily wrt external unparsed entities (eg figures) to
the extent that it now offers _less_ extensibility than SGML did. Of
course it's possible to hack your way around it, as many of the gureaux
suggested, but publishers with an established and proven workflow don't
want to start making changes unless they can see stability resulting. It
wasn't helped by the fact that many of us involved with XML at the early
stages did ask (beg) publishers to get involved, but they declined or
feigned not to think it necessary, and are now hoist with their own petard.
///Peter
EdGatzke
> > It's actually cheaper to rekey the whole document from scratch, or to
> > hand-edit RTF or Word into shape, than to edit out the errors and
> > misunderstandings in authors' [La]TeX sources.
>
> Agreed! To most users the very thought of having to get outside some
> well known WP gives them the creeps. So we keep them easy simply
> teaching them to save their work in RTF/ODF.
>
I personally love LyX, I have used it a ton for books and papers and
my thesis. It has come a long way over the years, I think I started
using it in 98 or 99.
Even some of the engineering journals are moving to word and dropping
latex support (in some cases). What a mistake! I have run into word-
only in a few places. I bet their publisher just puts it all back
into latex on the back end...
There is a decent tex2word converter from Chikaborti software. It
does a pretty good job with equations at least, so you don't have to
retype equations in. And if you have bib items in your tex file, it
will link them into a word doc appropriately. I have had trouble with
tables and figs, but that is ok. They also sell a word2tex converter
that does an adequate job on a lot of things, but I have not tried it
with advanced Word documents. Both of these converters have saved me
hours in the past instead of rekeying a document.
Tyler Smith
>>
>> > It's actually cheaper to rekey the whole document from scratch, or to
>> > hand-edit RTF or Word into shape, than to edit out the errors and
>> > misunderstandings in authors' [La]TeX sources.
>>
>> Agreed! To most users the very thought of having to get outside some
>> well known WP gives them the creeps. So we keep them easy simply
>> teaching them to save their work in RTF/ODF.
>>
>
> does a pretty good job with equations at least, so you don't have to
> retype equations in. And if you have bib items in your tex file, it
> will link them into a word doc appropriately. I have had trouble with
> tables and figs, but that is ok. They also sell a word2tex converter
> that does an adequate job on a lot of things, but I have not tried it
> with advanced Word documents. Both of these converters have saved me
> hours in the past instead of rekeying a document.
>
latex2rtf is free, available for *nixes at least, I don't know if
there's a MS or Mac version. It seems to work pretty well for standard
LaTeX, converts tables without problem, some equations get lost, and
figures need some resizing. Still, far better than rekeying a
document.
Tyler
blm...@myrealbox.com
Luis Rivera <jlr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 5, 3:46 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:
> >
> > A few more details about the horror story I related upthread:
> >
> > The authors, aware that they were not experts in knowing how to
> > make a book look good, tried to deliver a manuscript with an
> > internal structure that would make it easy for the publishers
> > to override their (the authors') typesetting decisions.
> > They used standard macros where that seemed appropriate --
> > e.g., for sectioning. However, where there didn't seem to
> > be standard macros to express a desired logical structure,
> > they invented their own. All such macros were collected in
> > a single place into a "authors' macros" file \input'd into
> > the main document and commented at least a little to indicate
> > their purpose.
> >
> > Example:
[ snip ]
> > They never found out whether this effort to make good use
> > of LaTeX's ability to express internal structure was a help
> > or a hindrance, or even noticed. Any comments from your
> > perspective on the other side of the author/publisher divide?
> >
>
> Well, apparently the authors did the Right Thing; I would recommend
> this kind of approach myself. If I were typesetting that piece, I'd
> appreciate the effort.
Good to hear.
> As for the typesetters themselves, I don't know
> what they did, so what can I say? :-)
Only what you did! as for whether the typesetters in my story
felt similarly, it's hard to say. but given how other things
were handled (bibliography edited by modifying .bbl rather
than .bib, e.g.) it's not clear they were very TeX-savvy.
Who knows!
--
Decline To State
(But the e-mail address in the header is real.)
blm...@myrealbox.com
Peter Flynn <remov...@m.from.email.address> wrote:
> blm...@myrealbox.com wrote:
> > In article <1178139029....@y80g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
> > Luis Rivera <jlr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> The problem seems to go back to DEK himself, who, if memory doesn't
> >> fail, started working on TeX precisely because he didn't like the
> >> proofs sent by his publisher. What strikes me as remarkable in this
> >> thread is the sense that some publishers still seem to have little or
> >> no interest into processing LaTeX source or using TeX as their
> >> typesetter.
>
> None whatsoever. They've been frightened off [La]TeX forever by the
> grotesque rubbish they were sent when they first tried it.
[ snip ]
> > About having people send you things in an open format .... Maybe
> > I just don't know enough about RTF, but I had the idea that it wasn't
> > really capable of expressing the kind of logical markup that LaTeX
> > is so good at, and so going this route would reduce everything to
> > WYSIAYG. I guess for simple documents that could be okay, but for
> > something with a lot of references, or an index, it seems like the
> > wrong approach.
>
> It's actually cheaper to rekey the whole document from scratch, or to
> hand-edit RTF or Word into shape, than to edit out the errors and
> misunderstandings in authors' [La]TeX sources.
So it sounds like this is another situation in which the clueless
(on the author side of the interaction) have ruined things for
the clueful. How sad -- or frustrating, or something.
[ snip ]
blm...@myrealbox.com
> > Publishers couldn't give a tinker's fart about structure. Their job is
> > to get the book out the door and onto the shelves, and so long as they
> > think it looks right, they're satisfied. The typesetting houses they
> > employ are sometimes asked to return XML with the PDFs or film they
> > create, so that there is a marginally well-formed document in the
> > archives representing what was published, but it hasn't yet dawned on
> > the publishers that there is added value to be got from having the
> > document in a sensible format.
Indeed. In my sad story upthread, some time could have been
saved if the book-production people had made bibliography
changes by changing the supplied .bib file and rerunning BibTeX
rather than by changing the generated .bbl file. Of course,
some of the time saved would have been the authors' time,
which might not be a factor. :-(?
> The irony of course here is that established working habits not only
> go against a proper structuring of a job, but are written into formats
> which should be wholly focused on a formal structure, thus negating
> any sort of usage beyond merely re-running the job.
>
> A classic example of this is the brain-dead, traditional filenaming
> convention of f<chapter>-<figurenumber>.<file_extension> --- so that
> next edition, when one adds a figure at the beginning of chapter 13,
> _every_ figure in chapter 13 has to not only be re-named, but also _re-
> linked_ (and if one misses on, you get a duplicate figure).
>
> Moreover, said naming convention precludes re-using the figure graphic
> in a different project w/o re-naming it (unless of course, it just so
> happens to coincidentally be used in exactly the same chapter number,
> as exactly the same figure number).
Sing it, brother.
I've looked at the publisher's "instructions to authors"
given to the authors in my story upthread, and they specify
that filenames (for both figures and chapters) follow this
seemingly idiotic convention. My admittedly biased guess
was that this had something to do with the limitations of
the most commonly used word-processing programs, but maybe
it's really that neither most publishers nor most authors
really understand that there's any alternative?
Tom Micevski
> So it sounds like this is another situation in which the clueless
> (on the author side of the interaction) have ruined things for
> the clueful. How sad -- or frustrating, or something.
as perfectly illustrated in 1 or 2 current threads.