Re: Exporting fonts (was Re: unicode fonts (Word 2004))

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From: Ronald Florence (ron_at_18james.com)
Date: 08/29/04 

Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 21:04:31 -0400

Elliott Roper wrote:

> On the other hand a university publisher would prefer LaTeX surely?
> If I were a publisher, I'd be running LaTeX courses for all my writers
> and supporting a TeXniXal ;-) department for creating special TeX
> macros for guys like you who need runes more than you need fonts ;-)

I have a book coming out early November from the University of Wisconsin
Press <http://www.18james.com/blood-libel.html>. I submitted the ms. in
LaTeX; they insisted that it be translated to ms-word; we settled on
rtf, but most of the structure of LaTeX is lost in the translation.
Alas in history and fiction, university and trade publishers want
"ms-word" submissions despite its obvious weaknesses as a format and as
an editor/formatter.

> As an aside, I spent a little time this morning looking for LaTeX tools
> that support unicode. I am still a bit confused about what might work.
>
> I have not yet sprung for Word 2004, so I don't yet have first hand
> experience with Word's unicode, but I'm fearing the worst and teaching
> myself LaTeX and emacs. Something I should have done years ago.

You might want to try LyX instead of the emacs/LaTeX combination, and
since you're in a Mac newsgroup, LyX/Mac. It is a WYSIWYM (what you see
is what you mean) editor which uses LaTeX as the formatting engine. See
http://www.18james.com/lyx-mac.html for screenshots and a howto. (I'm
somewhat prejudiced: I did the port.) For what it is worth, I still
take notes and do code in emacs, and wrote a couple of books with emacs
& LaTeX before I discovered LyX. My fingers think in emacs.

> What Word needs is an author/publisher view. Perhaps all that we don't
> have is a set of templates and page set-ups. Ronald, you could probably
> help me here. What do the publishers give you in the way of templates
> and styles and procedures to make your dealing with them efficient?

Publishers (at least trade and university presses in fields like history
or fiction want a manuscript that is effectively not formatted -- all in
one font and fontsize, including the headings, one file per chapter.
Unlike publishers of scientific books and science journals, who prefer
the work effectively camera-ready (hence LaTeX) trade publishers want a
manuscript that they can feed into their editing, copy-editing, and
design/layout software. It's frustrating, but after eight books I've
stopped fighting, which is why I have switched to ms-word despite it's
obvious weaknesses, unreliability, and annoying mis-features.

I've always thought the three most wrenching experiences are divorce, a
new agent, and changing editor/formatters. Still married to the same
woman, but got a new agent this year after 25 years with the former
agent, and switched from LaTeX/LyX to ms-word. No wonder I'm such a
grump and curmudgeon. 

-- 
Ronald Florence				ron.18james.com

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