On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 at 02:12, Tim via users <users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 2020-08-11 at 15:39 -0700, ToddAndMargo via users wrote:
> So I put him on LO. He is writing up a book or something.
A word processor, any word processor, is not a particularly good choice
for writing a book. They've long since gone from being a "word
processor" to being a secretary's all-purpose convoluted typing tool.
They're not particularly conducive to writing paragraphs and pages as
just paragraphs and pages, often horrible at very long documents, and
not really good for doing page layout. Probably not a very useful
format if you were going to take a book to a printing house, either.
Many print shops want standards compliant PDF's, some will accept
Word. My wife once needed a fanfold handout, so I created a PDF
using LaTeX. The printer remarked that it had been years since he
had seen formatting of comparable quality. Now Word has a
TeX engine.
Latex is the usual suggestion for real authors, but will be even more
of a bastard to use if you're not into that kind of thing.
LaTeX doesn't have to be difficult if you are working with an academic
publisher that supports it. Many of the people who found it difficult
were following bad advice that is all too easy to find on the internet.
LaTeX is designed to allow authors to focus on the logical structure
of a document. Details of formatting are handled by a "document
class", and scientific publishers usually provide a document class
that conforms to the style of a particular book series. Authors
need to learn some LaTeX markup commands, usually by
imitating a sample document from the publisher or a colleague's
previous published LaTeX file. At my former work dozens of
students and postdocs who had been using Word were able to
switch to LaTeX with minimal effort. There are sometimes
glitches that need help from an experienced user. In academia
such help is readily available, but there are also many online
sources of help. Unfortunately, the internet also has many
sites offering really bad advice for LaTeX users.
Many non-science publishers contract out the final tweaking/editing
and rarely contractors who use anything other than Word.
It is worth noting that LaTeX originated on systems with ASCII
character sets. There has been a big effort to support Unicode
fonts, including work by a consortium of academic publishers and
societies to develop high quality free Unicode fonts (STIX2) with
comprehensive coverage of scientific symbols. Microsoft developed
Cambria Math. These efforts also led to a new "TeX engine", LuaTeX,
so those who need Unicode support are well advised to use LuaLaTeX.
For linux, LuaLaTeX is provided by TeX Live, which is packaged by
linux distros and also available from the TeX User Group (tug.org).
--
George N. White III
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