[OS X TeX] Macintouch report on TeX versus Word

[Alex Hamann]

Hi,

On 19.01.2009, at 23:28, David Derbes wrote:

> My experience is a little different, but it may be worth reporting.
>
> I have transcribed two books (Freeman Dyson's "Advanced Quantum  
> Mechanics" and Lillian Lieber's "The Einstein Theory of  
> Relativity"). The first was, after I posted it to the arXiv, picked  
> up by World Scientific. They are used to LaTeX and had no trouble  
> at all making such adaptations as they wished to my LaTeX source.  
> The second was going to be reset laboriously into Quark. The guy  
> that was going to do it wanted USD 8 a page, which would have been  
> ruinously expensive to the publishers. I volunteered to do whatever  
> they wanted. It was a little time consuming but not really terrible  
> (had to put proof marks in and learn how to do that; had to change  
> the font for pagination, and so on.)
>
> I think that the publishers of the world (whether or not they do  
> mathematics) would save themselves a lot of time, money and grief  
> were they to set a few of their team to learn LaTeX. I was told by  
> my main liaison at the Lieber publishers that most typesetters he  
> was familiar with were "terrified" of LaTeX. I find this astounding.
>

In June 2007 there was a similar discussion on the texhax mailing  
list. I found these two interesting links there:
http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/latex.html#tex-latex_publishers
http://www-lsi.upc.es/~valiente/journals.html
So fortunately there are some publishers who possess some common  
sense....


Alex


> God only knows what time and money have been wasted by people  
> wrestling with the capricious behavior of various releases of Word.
>
> David Derbes
> U of Chicago Laboratory Schools
>
> On Jan 19, 2009, at 5:02 PM, David B. Thompson, Ph.D., P.E., D.WRE,  
> CFM wrote:



snip