SPUG: Minimal Perl web site & notification requests

[Itay Furman]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Tim Maher wrote:

> And used what other "standard format" instead?  Like it or not,
> standards are important, and MS-Word is the current standard for the
> publishing industry.
>

Do they actually use MS-word to _typeset_ the documents, or is it 
just a submission standard format?  Is MS-word aware of things 
like ligatures and kerning? and hyphenation?  These are the bread 
and butter of high quality typography; convenience macros for 
automating references, indexing, whatever, come next.

>> I am announcing now that I refuse to deal with a publisher who
>> not only uses MS-word but then complains that it takes too long and has to
>> charge extra.
>
> The publisher is /not/ charging the readers extra because the
> author has to submit the manuscript in MS-Word format.
>

Don't count on that.  Since Word does not support automated high 
quality typography, and has lame macro facilities, someone _else_ 
has to do the job, and the customers will pay for this. Had you 
started with fonts and format similar to what the publisher uses, 
so the page count would not change significantly, I am sure there 
would have been an overhead due to the converstion to Word.

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