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Thanks for your thoughts, Appreciate it. My problem is not the tool to use for formatting, it's more the thought of his time vs our time in terms of costs. Obviously his time is much more expensive than ours and formatting seems a rather 'mechanical' job once the template is set. I feel somewhat guilty that he spends his time on a task that could be done by a DTP person who makes much less, even though the author likes TeX and doesn't mind doing his own formatting. So, actually the problem is more psychological in nature. I'd like to tell him that we can do the same job with Word, but apparently that is not the case.
We need to edit his files (general editing) and this really makes my editor nervous, because the author is very opinionated and writes well. He will question every dot and comma.
Thanks again,
Erika
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I'm a bit confused as to why when dealing with an scientist who has
already written multiple textbooks, and is described as a "power user"
of TeX, anyone would want him to abandon a tool that Wikipedia
describes as "designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody
to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and
to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all
computers, now and in the future."
As a scientist, he's going to want to have his formula laid out in a
particular manner, and he's using a tool designed to do just that.
He's already familiar with formatting, and wants to use a style guide.
So I guess I'm not seeing the problem here? Unless it's that he's not
using Word like the rest of the world, and instead is using a tool
that the scientific community specifically uses for book layout?
What is it that you need to do with his files? General editing?
Where is the advantage of forcing him into Word?
>
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