Do publishers in the humanities like latex

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Do publishers in the humanities like latex

(11 posts)

xrobbo
Member

Hello all, this is my first topic. I'm considering to shift from word to latex. My worry is not technical but pragmatic: when you submit articles or books that will have to be edited (to a journal or a publisher), in which format do you send them? Do they accept .tex files? Or you just shift to .pdf? I ask this because my publisher in Italy does not use .tex. Thanks for any comments.

Posted 1 year ago #
Kevin Klement
Key Master

Welcome to the forums.

Publishers are all over the place. Some like it, and even use it themselves for their typesetting. Some hate it, and insist that the documents you submit be in Word format. (I really think it's just shameful to insist that a proprietary format be used for academic work, but you'll still find it.)

In the latter case, I usually use a converter such as latex2rtf or the “mk4ht oolatex” script for TeX4ht to convert to RTF or ODT and then convert one of those to Word format using OpenOffice or AbiWord. I still will often submit the LaTeX-generated PDF along with the Word document to show what it “should” look like.

Professional typesetting has become kind of joke in recent years, however. I find that 90% of the time, my LaTeX documents look better than the professionally typeset junk, and that half of my time spent checking proofs consists in pleading with the copyeditor to attempt to make things look as good as they did in my original.

It’s hard to predict what the future will bring. I think the economic troubles facing our institutions and library acquisition budgets coupled with the ridiculous prices the journals from for-profit publishers are charging these days will likely force more and more editors to look for cheaper publishing options, and nothing is cheaper than free. But what do I know?

In any case, I’m certainly not going to let publisher's preferences dictate what I use to create my file. Converters for just about everything exist these days, and while they don’t do a perfect job, it’s their job to make the end product look good, especially if they have such a stringent workflow that they won’t let you submit in your own desired format.

Posted 1 year ago #
Charlie Tanksley
Key Master

Hi,

I always submit pdf files when a paper is being reviewed. But for most journals you have to submit a .doc or .rtf file for the version to be published (though more seem to be taking .tex files than before).

There are debates about the cost of writing in LaTeX (here is a very recent one). Writing a paper isn't a terribly quick process. I happen to like using a good text editor much more than a word processor. And I like thinking about and dealing explicitly with the markup of LaTeX. So, for me, the cost of turning a .tex file into a .doc file at the end of the process is worth it. But it isn't for everyone.

Posted 1 year ago #
xrobbo
Member

Thanks for making this clear. In short: you edit your text with a latex editor, than to submit it to a publiser/journal you print it to pdf and covnert it to rtf/word and send them both. They make the final editing on the converted version. This means that the main reason for working with latex should lie in personal advantage (the published final version is in fact not directly affected by the editing system as it has to be converted). With personal advantage I mean: you control your text better than with word processors; you get for your use (personal, on web page etc) better texts. And you hope that one day publishers will take .tex files. Am i getting things right?

Posted 1 year ago #
Kevin Klement
Key Master

More or less, though there are already quite a few that will already accept .tex files.

I've had five papers published or accepted in the past year. Of those, four of the publishers accepted my .tex source. Only one required that I convert to Word format first. That's a pretty lucky record, I'll admit. Two of the five actually use LaTeX to typeset the published version. But these are both logic journals, and it helps to have that as one of my subareas, definitely. In one case, my page proofs were almost indistinguishable from the document I submitted, which made proofing a breeze.

Personally, if a publisher won't accept tex (and especially if they only accept proprietary formats like Word format; less so if they accept other non-proprietary formats like html or odt), I give them a spiel about why they should. In one case, I think I actually helped convince them to start accepting .tex files in the future. I'm not sure I'd have felt comfortable lecturing copy-editors prior to getting tenure, though!

Posted 1 year ago #
dvw
Member

Recently I submitted a latex file to a journal, which then told me that they can only process rtf files or so. There are two reasons for submitting articles as rtf: 1. Some journals need rtf files for the typesetting; 2. rtf allows making comments. (In latex files the only possibility I see is adding comments in capital letters. Do you have other suggestions?) So I am thinking whether in the future I should produce my papers as latex and then convert them to rtf (with tex4ht), or produce the papers as rtf (or rather odt) and at the end convert them to latex in order to produce a proper version for the open access repository).

One problem is the bibliography. In latex I produce it with biblatex, in LibreOffice with Jabref. One further reason for producing the paper as rtf is that then it is easier to format the bibliography with the journal's style. Or is it easier that I think to modify Biblatex bibliographies? Otherwise Biblatex produces perfect bibliographies and adds nice hyperlinks.

One more reason for producing the paper as rtf: If I produce the article first as latex and then convert it to submit it as rtf, then I have to make all changes after the submission in the latex file additionally.

It looks as if after all for journals who do not accept latex files, it is better to produce first a rtf file. How do you do these things? Any advice?

Posted 1 year ago #
Kevin Klement
Key Master

dvw, the journal's policy is probably only important once the file gets accepted for publication. (I would avoid like the plague a journal that insisted upon a certain format prior to that.)

I'd write the document in LaTeX, and if and when the file gets accepted for publication would I work on converting to RTF. You could use TeX4ht or else latex2rtf. (See my post on converting; either one should be fine with biblatex bibliography.) Sure, I'll meet them halfway by sending a converted RTF file if they want it, but I'll also send them a PDF of the LaTeX output and tell them that it should take precedence when they check to see if they've typeset things properly.

Some things might not convert perfectly, but heck, if you simply convert a Word file to RTF and send it to someone with different fonts installed, some things could potentially get lost, so usually you need to send a PDF along with it anyway. It's their job to make the output look at least as good as the original.

But tell them from me that the reasons you (they?) cited to prefer RTF make no sense.

RTF and LaTeX are very similar file formats. Cat an .rtf file from the command line sometime -- you'll see it looks quite a bit like a LaTeX file. Indeed, I think Microsoft probably modeled RTF on (plain) TeX. It consists of text along with escaped commands that begin with \ -- just like LaTeX. There is certainly no "need" to prefer RTF over LaTeX. If they do, it's out of pure laziness or familiarity. RTF is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft, and morally, insisting upon it (or Word format, which is more common) is just an absurdly restrictive policy to hold, and I'd just read the riot act to any journal which not only insisted on that format, but somehow insisted that the document be "perfectly" converted to it. What's next? Rejecting my signature if it's not signed with ink from a Bic pen?

Now, about comments, I don't know what you mean. If you mean unprinted comments, you can of course use % comments (or the comment package) in your source. If you mean floating boxes that show up on the preview you can use the pdfcomment package, or just the comments and mark-up feature of Acrobat on the result.

RTF has no special resources at all for bibliography management, so I cannot see how it could be easier than BibTeX/BibLaTeX. Of course, the latter are easier if the journal has provided their own stylesheet, but you can usually make do even if they haven't. I think Word has some citation management stuff built in these days, but I don't think many people use it, and I'd be very surprised if it were easier to use.

Posted 1 year ago #
dvw
Member

Thanks, Kevin. At least some journals do not even accept submissions as LaTeX. (Is it not even the majority?) Recently, an editor asked me to write an article for them with a text processor (Word) because all comments and changes made during the correspondence between author, editor, and referees are made with this format. Here comes in my questions about 'comments'. I mean the special functions of text processors with which one can make changes in a text so that one can see the changes (in red) as well as the changed text. That is a bit more powerful than %. Or is there a better way to do it in a LaTeX file?

On the bibliography: Don't you find it cumbersome to produce with biblatex bibliographies which accord to the exact rules of each journal?

Posted 1 year ago #
Kevin Klement
Key Master

If you tell me who the editor of this Word-only journal is, I'll happily send him or her a piece of my mind. Seriously, is owning a copy of Word a prerequisite for submitting to this journal? Or refereeing for this journal? That's really a bad policy. They'd better not ask me to referee.

About marking changes, I think you're thinking not so much of comments, but Word's "track-changes" feature on its own, which is nice feature, I begrudingly admit. There are costs, of course, like a bloated file size and non-transparency in the file format. Still, that's gotta be Word format. RTF doesn't have that feature. By using a version control system like git or svn certainly you could achieve something similar or probably better with LaTeX files, but again, that could be a learning curve. You could do it with a special LaTeX package too, indeed, I think there are such for that. (A piece of mine recently published with LaTeX went through some stages of proofs where they were using some kind of special LaTeX package for showing chnages; I'm not sure what it was though since I only saw the PDFs.)

Still, I think it's very inappropriate for referees or editor to be actually making changes to the file before final acceptance. That's the prerogative of the author. Comments are fine, but comments could just as easily be put on a PDF. I think this journal is showing very questionable judgment.

I admit, I've never submitted something using BibLaTeX to a publisher. So far, the journals I've submitted to either had their own BibTeX style (so I didn't need to mess around with BibLaTeX), or weren't very picky about the references format for the submission, and were happy to "fix" it themselves.

Posted 1 year ago #
Seamus Bradley
Member

(One way of doing the "track changes" thing on LaTeX is with the LaTeXdiff pacakge. It's a little fragile, but it might be what they used?)

Posted 1 year ago #
veliyashin
Member
Hi everyone,

Is there a particular article template that you use for LaTeX or XeTeX?
- Veli
Posted 1 year ago #