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How are these books going to be published? Are you printing them in house
or have to submit camera-ready copy to a printer, or are manuscripts going
to go out to a full-service book printer?
Word processors are good tools for producing book manuscripts, but they're
not page design or typesetting tools.
TeX can produce PDFs for review. It can also export RTFs, but with loss of
formatitng.
Gene Kim-Eng
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 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.
>
>
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