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You might want to ask him to ignore te software tool, and focus
instead on what features of books he thinks are necessary for his
textbook. Often people gravitate to the tools they know with little
regard for why.
-Tony
On 2011-09-06, at 5:03 AM, Erika Yanovich <ERIKA_y -at- rad -dot- com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Our chief scientist (the author of several textbooks) is writing a new series (something between an idiot's guide and a scientific textbook) that we should edit and format. The neighboring marcom dept will design the cover and take care of production. Our tool is MS Word and that's what we intended to use for this purpose, but the author claims that Word can't produce 'real' books (by this he means the look and feel of modern textbooks).
>
> Is this true? Are there any [hidden] advanced features of Word for this purpose, not used by tech writers? What tools would you use?
> The author prefers TeX for which he has (and can develop) styles guides. Needless to say, he is a power user of TeX and he is used to produce camera-ready copies in postscript.
>
> I have mixed feelings about him doing the formatting (apparently he doesn't mind, but isn't his time too expensive for this?), based on our definitions (which is what he apparently expects). Also, how would we get it for review? What formats are available to export from TeX?
>
> Any thoughts appreciated.
>
> Erika
>
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