Some Journals Rejecting Office 2007 Format

hormiga writes "Some scholarly journals are rejecting submissions made using new Office 2007 formats. Science and Nature are among publishers unwilling to deal with incompatibilities in the new formats, and recommend using older versions of Office or converting to older formats before submission. The new equation editor is cited as a specific problem. Rob Wier recommends that those publishers consider using ODF instead."

Comments

Why use Doc at all?

[rritterson]

Why would you submit a journal paper in a closed, binary format? I'm surprised those two journals would even accept Microsoft formats. It makes a lot more sense to use something like TeX, to split the markup from the content, much the same way CSS and HTML work together. Not only is it easier to edit and send around the lab for editing, it's also much easier on the copy editors when they want to typeset it for printing. As far as I know, the journal only takes your images and text, and lays them out on the page. All of the extra crap Word stuffs into it's files is superfluous anyway.

Old fraud hanged. Open Office is winner.

[twitter]

The parable has the wrong ending:

"Nonsense", said the old man. If you offer a reward for something, of course you want more of it, not less. This is just the free market in action."

Next comes community outrage and jailtime for fraud. Let's hope we see some of that for all the intentional waste M$ has created in two decades of coercive monoply.

The author does get one thing right but fails to follow up on it correctly:

None of the cost-driver factors lead to reduced costs with multiple formats. They all have minimal costs when there is a a single format in use.

This is true but by this argument the lowest cost solution should be chosen and M$ has screwed themselves by creating a new non free format. Before they pushed OOXML, it could be argued that everyone had access to a M$ Word Processor. The use of a non free format created plenty of problems, but changing formats created others and people could pretend nothing was wrong. Now OOXML is used by none, so that choice maximizes the transaction costs for everyone. This should drive everone to Open Office, which costs nothing to install, works well with the old format and comes with a superior free format that all government agencies should be moving toward.

Re:It's always a surprise

[martin-boundary]

Those who use Word are usually in the soft sciences, like economics or parapsychology, where practically any word processor is adequate since the arguments are mainly text and small tables of numbers.

Of course if those people had any clue, they'd realize that file formats matter in the long run and if they use popular word processors, they will probably not be able to reopen their own documents 100% accurately in ten years time.

Re:Yet at my job

[drsmithy]

Word Perfect 5.1 and MS Office 97.

Why do you consider a character-based, DOS word processor released in 1989 and a GUI-based, Windows office suite released in 1997 equivalent ?

Why oh why did we ever buy any office suits after these?

Have you ever even used WP 5.1 ? It's not even close to being an "office suite".

Why on Earth would you consider either of those two programs some form of "gold standard" ?