[OS X TeX] Why does this hang so = [OT] electronic books

[Jason Davies]

On 27 Oct 2009, at 22:46, Herbert Schulz wrote:

> I guess I interpret the statement as referring to the writing of the  
> book rather than the typesetting.
>
> When I was going to graduate school (quite a bit before TeX was  
> around) I understood that books that contained maths were expensive  
> because they required specially trained typesetting talent. Now that  
> there is software that allows for the author typesetting the maths  
> with no special typesetting talent necessary I no longer understand  
> why books are so expensive.


I provided TeX of my book to my (very reputable) press, who generally  
take Word documents from authors and convert them into XML (I gather).  
They got confused by it and I almost wished by the end that I had sent  
them RTF as it was their usual workflow. I doubt they have a model for  
'not having to typeset it therefore a discount' AND it still took a  
surprising amount of tweaking by their TeX specialists for various  
reasons (my favourite was the way they hyphenated the author  
'Ammianus' across two pages, use your imagination.) Copyediting and  
proofreading was pretty light because of the care I had taken but  
still had to be done. So most of the usual processes still had to run.  
Then there's publicity, the cover illustration...