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

Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh, strange that Science and Nature are using a standard text editor format at all. You'd thing something TeX-based would be more suited for this purpose(based on my experiences on writing math on computers).

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[larry bagina]

Science and Nature are more about biological/geological/cellular/laboratory science. "Math" mean statistics and some charts and graphs.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Rakishi]

To add to what the other poster said, many scientists who only need to use small amounts of math use word or similar stuff. It's faster than using tex probably and doesn't have a learning curve.
This of course annoys the statisticians who need to work with them.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[porcupine8]

Hell yes they do. My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot. I'm in grad school in a social science field, and I rarely to never would even put an equation of any sort in a paper. I'd run all my ANOVAs and regressions and whatever other stats on SPSS and then put in some graphs and tables that show numbers, not variables. I might use N or F or p. Biologists would be much closer to what I do than to what he does, though physicists would be closer to him (he publishes in some physics journals as well). I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[m4cph1sto]

My experience is that most journals accept TeX submissions, but they strongly recommend submissions using a Word (2003 or earlier) template. Personally, I write all my papers using LaTeX, and submit the TeX-generated PDFs to the journals. Then I generate a Word document using a program like Tex2Word (or whatever) and submit that as well. The journal emails only the PDF (which, thanks to TeX, looks nice and professional) to the reviewers. The reason journals require a Word document is because it is simple for them to copy the text from the Word document into their commercial typesetting system to produce the print versions of the article. Since most journals don't use TeX as their internal typesetting system, conversion of TeX submissions to their proprietary format takes extra effort on their part, and they discourage it. However, many journals (ACS journals in particular) will still accept TeX submissions, simply because so many academics use it.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[grolschie]

You can do all that in MS Word too.

I'd prefer LaTeX over buggy MS Equation Editor any day.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Anthony]

They are quite cognisant of TeX. There is extensive submission guidlines.

"Please do not send TeX or LaTeX files for your initial submission. Convert the files to PostScript or PDF instead. [Important: Screen legibility of the PostScript or PDF file is essential for rapid and thorough evaluation of your manuscript; please ensure that the .ps or .pdf file you generate from your TeX/LaTeX source does not include Type 3 bitmapped fonts.]

Although we do not accept TeX and LaTeX source for initial manuscript submission, these formats are acceptable for manuscripts that have been revised after peer review. To save time at this later stage, authors using these packages for their initial submission are encouraged to review our instructions for preparing text and tables using LaTeX."

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[lahvak]

My husband is a mathematician, and he uses the whole alphabet, the whole greek alphabet, and then has to improvise in some of his papers, and it's full of actual equations with all kinds of superscripts and subscripts and various integration symbols and whatnot. You can do all that in MS Word too. So why does your husband use LaTeX? I cannot speak for her husband, but maybe the reason is that most math journals will not accept anything but LaTeX (or maybe AMSTeX). Also, MS equation editor is incredibly painful, using LaTeX is simply so much easier. In grad school I had a part time job working for a textbook publisher, and had to write couple hundred pages in MS Word, with bunch of (relatively simple) equations, and it was one of the most painful things I have ever done.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Kadin2048]

You can do all that in MS Word too. So why does your husband use LaTeX?

Yeah, and you could write your papers on vellum made from your own skin, using fragments of your own bone, with your blood as ink ... but some of us would rather avoid the pain.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[The One and Only]

I always wondered why scientists and mathematicians used the error-prone and easy-to-confuse-with-the-Latin-alphabet Greek alphabet, while less ambiguous (and perhaps easier) alternatives, such as the Cyrillic or Egyptian alphabets, remain unused. Also, I think "cat" and "roach" would be awesome variables.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[miskatonic alumnus]

Neither does he. You don't need LaTeX to write mathematics. The field got along quite well for a rather long time before LaTeX came to be.

Sure. For that matter, you don't need a computer, typewriter, ink, or paper either. Just draw figures in the sand with a stick like Archimedes. However, LaTeX is easy to learn, portable, and produces visually pleasing mathematics. Word processors are clumsy, non-portable, and produces mathematics that looks as if it were written by a sixth-grader.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[BrokenHalo]

Most of the journals I use (in the molecular and microbiology fields) are quite happy with submissions in TeX/LaTeX formats or MSWord formats. They don't care so long as the formatting is done appropriately for the article and conforms to their conventions such as referencing and general layout.

In other words, nothing to get wound up about, just get on with your job.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[ceoyoyo]

Because the mathematicians who inspired the west were Greek.

Although in my field we frequently use at least one letter from Farsi.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[PDAllen]

When you use LaTeX you get what you wanted fairly quickly, and it comes out the same on any computer anywhere, and you end up with PDFs that do the same, so you can take them to a conference. And journals accept it.

When you use MS word it takes forever to get anything like what you wanted (subscripts on superscripts, tower-type functions?), then when you change something elsewhere in the document or email it to a coauthor something breaks and the equations get changed. And you end up trying to use powerpoint to do presentations, which means you take it to a conference and what appears on the screen is a bunch of hearts and spades instead of the right symbols (seen this happen, just once). Which is why journals generally don't accept it.

LaTeX predates MS word, anyway. Before that, you sent a handwritten or typed paper to the journal, which again isn't going to get there and have all the equations different to how they looked when you wrote it.

That said, if I was trying to write a paper with lots of detailed diagrams I might not want to use LaTeX; it's fine for line and block diagrams (which is all I need for combinatorics papers) via xfig, but I wouldn't want to try to, say, draw some anatomical thing. And it doesn't really seem to handle jpeg inclusion very nicely.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[The One and Only]

That doesn't mean you should use lowercase rho for density (looks like p) or lowercase omega for angular velocity (looks like w) when something completely unambiguous like a little pictogram kittycat would work just as well.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Romwell]

Why LaTeX?! Anyone who ever used LaTeX extensively would find your question insane. The brief answers is - because it is much more convinient, powerful, user-friendly; because it is takes much less time to LaTeX a document than to type it in Word; because Word was never meant to be a typestting/publishing tool, and LaTeX was... It's like asking "You can move around on a wheelchair, why use feet ?"

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[ljw1004]

It's worth checking out the new Office2007 equation editor (which is also built into Wordpad in Vista). It typesets maths more elegantly than TeX thanks to kerning that's aware of the whitespace in each corner of a glyph or compound glyph. Also it's unicode through and through which allows for more uniformity between body text and equations. Apart from those things, it uses the standard tex-style algorithms for equations. The new equation editor itself is rock solid.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[ljw1004]

The new Office2007 equation editor has a "linear syntax" that's very similar to the latex syntax. I guess it's more like the "Display-Latex" project that's integrated into emacs, where you type some normal latex maths and press a key and it instantly renders into the graphical version. Office2007 does the same. So the complaint that "MS Equation Editor is painful" no longer applies.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Bert64]

It can include PNG, PDF or EPS format images...
Jpeg being a lossy format wouldnt really be suitable, its ok for real life photos but a very poor format for representing artificial constructs like graphs.
Also, bitmapped images will look poor when printed on a high resolution printer, although you can include a huge image and latex will scale it down appropriately.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[GreatBunzinni]

Cyrillic? You mean the alphabet which adopted symbols with both the greek and the latin alphabet? Do you really believe that it is better suited than the greek alphabet?

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Man Eating Duck]

You'd thing something TeX-based would be more suited for this purpose

Maybe for writing it, but not for submissions. You tend to run into all sorts of conversion problems, font incompatibility among other things. Most printing houses only accept PDF from professional clients.

Word is a surprisingly common format in the publishing business. I work at an academic publishing house, handling the preparation of documents for printing. We publish most of the theses for a large university, as well as ~70 books and other publications a year.

Regarding books and similar projects, we try to accept any format we can convert to something you can import into a typesetting application. The thing is that among academics, more than the most basic knowledge of computers is uncommon. They use whichever program is available, most commonly Word. Formulae, graphs, even tables, are ofthen created in a suitable program, and inserted into the document as an image. We have the technical expertise to convert whatever they submit into something printable. It is not their concern, neither should it be.

I don't get why the journals would balk at any specific format, they should have the means to convert it anyway. Let the scientists worry about the science, and the publisher handle the preparation of the manuscript. In the worst case you request better source material, but that should be quite rare.

Still, I would love for all our authors to use something better than Word :)

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[r3m0t]

It's got latex names for most symbols and constructs but it doesn't actually work like LaTeX. I was amused reading the developers' blog posts who never mentioned LaTeX at all.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sparr0]

Is this supposed to be funny? TFA explicitly states that anything produced by the new equation editor, which can't output to MathML, is unusable for multiple reasons including DRM.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sangui5]

I could use LaTeX like he does, but I don't really have a need for it. This smells of the 80/20 rule in Office: 80% of the people only use (or even know about) 20% of the functionality. Being good at formatting math is just part of the functionality of LaTeX. There are lots of things that LaTeX is good at (and Office stinks at), which would probably be quite useful to you.

1. PDF Publishing. Nowadays, if your paper isn't published on the web as a PDF, it isn't nearly as influential. Some people won't even bother reading it. Now, if you're on a Mac, publishing to PDF is pretty good, but no such luck for Windows. You have to buy Acrobat separately.
2. Citations and bibliographies. Hmm, LaTeX comes with BibTeX; I haven't manually generated a citation or a bibliography entry since forever. I don't even have to write the BibTeX; just Google "paper title + bibtex" or check one of the standard online sources. Office has minimal support for bibliographies; guess you'll have to buy EndNote.
3. Support for concurrent editing. LaTeX lets you split up your sections into multiple chunks; indeed it encourages you to do so. So I can be working on one section and my coauthors can work on others. Now, truthfully, we *do* use RCS to synchronize, but we've done it without it. Or you could be fancy and use CVS or SVN and have concurrent editing of the same file. Word, um, can't do that. At all.
4. Automatic formatting. It always amazes me that people are willing to fight with Word to get their document to meet a formatting requirement. In LaTeX, I just download the style file provided by the conference. Now, Word does have templates, but they seem rather fragile to me, and while Science and Nature may give templates (I don't know), some other journals do not.

Really, Office isn't nearly as good as people make it out to be. And LaTeX isn't nearly as hard; especially if you use one of the WYSIWYG editors.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[SunTzuWarmaster]

You actually make a valid point. At more than one point in my college environment I took up writing an alternate symbol to represent something.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[porcupine8]

I'm not saying that Word clearly has more functionality than LaTeX and so is a far superior choice - just trying to show why not all science fields NEED LaTeX as badly as others do.

Btw, on #1 we do use Macs (so does his math dept actually); #2 my university does provide EndNote, but I will say that I'm impressed with BibTeX; #3 and #4 I've never really had problems yet with but I'm sure you're probably right.

It mostly comes down to: Most people know Word and similar word processors and have been using them for decades, and there is a good chunk of my field (though probably not the majority, since some of the field is about writing software) who are not computer whizzes. LaTeX would have to have some really huge and obvious advantages to get the entire field (or most of it) to switch. And if it's not standard, journals won't be accepting it anyhow, and things like #3 cease to matter if none of my collaborators use it.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[shellbeach]

My experience is that most journals accept TeX submissions. Your experience clearly has not been in the biological sciences. Very few accept latex, and those that do will do so grudgingly.

I don't even want to think about the amount of time I've lost playing around with latex2rtf and tex4ht trying to convert my latex papers to an acceptable format. The only saving grace is that some journals (Nature and its progeny for one) accept PDFs for the first submission.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[shellbeach]

They are quite cognisant of TeX. Well, Science might be, but Nature isn't.

Nature does take PDFs for initial submission, though, thank god.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[ceoyoyo]

I agree with you it would be clearer, and more entertaining too. Like so many other things we do it the not-the-best way because of tradition and the tradition stems from when smart people spoke Greek.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Awel]

The journal publishers don't actually use Word to typeset the papers. They will use a typesetting program such as Quark or InDesign, or indeed a LaTeX setter in some cases (it depends on the field and on the publisher). The trouble is that you don't want your authors to submit the paper in the format of the typesetting program, because (a) it's a bugger to convert from one format to another, and (b) you're going to have to reset it anyway even if they use the right file format, because you need to run spell-checkers and whatnot on it before typesetting, and you're pretty much guaranteed that the author won't have used journal style[1] (or even set up their text style formats in a rigorous way such that they can be easily converted). It's far better to make the whole process consistent by asking for a format which pretty much everyone will be able to provide, which preserves the text formatting designated by the author, and which can be easily imported into any of the typesetting programs once the spelling and style has been sorted out.

There's another consideration which is worth bearing in mind. Production and editorial are handled completely separately. The journal editor will be a scientist working in the field, as will be the reviewers. They don't want a fully laid-out paper; they just want something they can open and read easily. For some fields, LaTeX will be fine; for others it will just be a nuisance. Some of the larger journals have fancy online submission controls which will automagically convert your submission to PDF for this purpose, but many still don't. And just because an editor knows about their scientific field does not at all mean they know anything about computers and how to read a novel format. Most people can figure out how to read Word, however.

In the company I work for, which has handled production for a number of journals[2], we don't yet have Office 2007. This is because we use Apple Macs, as do many, perhaps most, production houses, and Office 2007 doesn't exist for Macs. We have, however, acquired a third-party importer, so we don't need to reject documents submitted in the latest format. Personally I find that there are many holes in Word, but that's what most people submit their papers in, whether they're asked to or not, so that's what we need to cater for.

[1] Most journals will impose a certain style on all papers for consistency: spelling (analyse or analyze?), numbers in the text (nine samples or 9 samples?), reference style (Vancouver or Harvard?), etc. Plus we have the different text styles for different levels of heading, figure legends, etc. Rare indeed is the author who can figure out exactly what the preferred options are and use them consistently, particularly as the paper may have been hawked round several journals before getting accepted by this one.

[2] Now in the process of being moved to Singapore because it's cheaper out there.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[WilliamSChips]

Completely ambiguous, but much harder to write.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Awel]

I don't even want to think about the amount of time I've lost playing around with latex2rtf and tex4ht trying to convert my latex papers to an acceptable format. Well if you didn't do that we in production would have to. We don't get paid enough to spend hours faffing about on each paper, and the people in Singapore, whither production is increasingly being moved, certainly don't!

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[budgenator]

Neither does he. You don't need LaTeX to write mathematics. The field got along quite well for a rather long time before LaTeX came to be
Think what you are referring to is the transition from cast in lead Linotype machine generated printing galleries to computer generating typesetting, because the TeX/LaTeX technology far preceedes the WYSIWYG word-processors. The TeX/LaTeX workflow involves a methodology foriegn to most, its an edit/compile/view process more like programming, yet there is its real power, the workflow lends itself to concepts from software engineering like version control, modularization, reuse of content and code into a workflow pipeline. You just have to remember that a word processor is for processing words, LaTeX is a document preperation system, use the right tool for the right job, not the tool Microsoft thinks might work with great difficulty because its what they have to sell.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[jc42]

If you want a nearly-inexhaustible supply of characters, the Chinese have the answer!

Of course, they do have a few examples of characters that are easy to confuse. For example, compare Unicode chars 5E02 and 5DFF. Those really are different characters, with different pronunciations and meanings. They even have different stroke counts.

But even with a 24x46 char size, there's a limit to the number of distinct glyphs you can draw (and there are more recognized Chinese characters than that ;-).

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[shalmaneser1]

minor fyis.

with word you can just print to postscript and convert to pdf pretty easily (using things like ghostscript and ps2pdf). doesn't give you bookmarks but everything else i've used it for works fine.
you also *can* do quite a lot via word templates and macros; but maybe there's a good latex editor out there that does the same?

word can be *very* frustrating to use on a regular basis -- trying to do simple things -- for instance trying to get bullets to indent consistently -- can drive me to tears.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[ljw1004]

I went to talks by the developers and spoke with them a lot. Yes, TeX was at the forefront of thir minds.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sapphon]

Hello - have you used Office 2007?

1. PDF publishing is supported (free) with a download from the Microsoft website (the only reason it wasn't bundled is because Adobe didn't want it to be).

2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word: there's that whole "Reference" tab. Not having used BibTeX I can't compare - but then, neither can you, apparently.

3. Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing. I don't know what that entails, but it's there, and easy to find.

4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference? Templates seem rather fragile to you, and some journals don't offer them. I'm not sure this even needs rebutting -- failure to offer templates isn't Word's fault, and, well they seem solid to me, so we're at 1:1

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively, but I do know it's not as bad as you make it out to be. That 80/20 rule is precisely what Microsoft tried to address with their new layout, since -- probably due to their ubiquity -- the Office products are routinely underrated as far as their functionality goes (probably less so by the /. crowd); Excel, for instance, has some powerful statistical tool. Sure, it's no STATA, but before I shell out $900 on STATA I'd rather install some modules and read some documentation.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[644bd346996]

Since when? I haven't bought Office in a long time, but I don't recall any of the versions I've used being able to export PS.

FYI: LaTeX is all macros and templates, on top of TeX. No special editor required.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[UnxMully]

I'd prefer LaTeX over buggy MS Equation Editor any day.

Then why not upgrade to MathType? Seriously, MathType is so much better than equation editor it's unfnny.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[SEMW]

When you use MS word it takes forever to get anything like what you wanted (subscripts on superscripts, tower-type functions?) I don't normally use Word to typeset equations, but I've just opened it and tried it and both of the things you mention seem pretty trivial to do. ^ gives superscripts, _ gives subscripts; x^(a_b) gives the subscript b on the superscript a, exactly as you'd expect. I'm not sure what you mean by tower-type functions; if you just mean lots of superscripts on top of each other there don't seem to be any obvious problems doing that on Word -- I got 50 of them quite quickly by copying and pasting "x^(x^(".. a few times.

then when you change something elsewhere in the document or email it to a coauthor something breaks and the equations get changed [...] what appears on the screen is a bunch of hearts and spades instead of the right symbols As far as I can tell, Word treats equations as drawing objects; if you change stuff elsewhere in the documents, it should just move them; it shouldn't be able to change things in the equation. WRT emailing the doc to someone else, if you're not sure they have the math font you have it's pretty trivial to embed the font in the document. And of course, if you want things to appear exactly the same on their end as on yours, you'd save to pdf, same as with any other document format.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[lahvak]

That's a good news, I guess. At least if there is an easy way to import and export TeX code to and from Word. Since the article complains that Word cannot export equations in MathML, my hopes are not high.

Even with all that, I still think TeX/LaTeX is easier to use. Maybe it's just that I don't know how to use Word properly, but if that's the case, than nobody I know knows (judging from bunch of word documents written by other people that I have to deal with). For example, is there a simple, fast and easy to remember way in Word to insert a stretchable vertical space between paragraphs?

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[uglyduckling]

Since when? I haven't bought Office in a long time, but I don't recall any of the versions I've used being able to export PS

Simple, you install a generic postscript printer driver (Apple Laserwriter will do) and print to file.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Kymermosst]

Then why not upgrade to MathType? Seriously, MathType is so much better than equation editor it's unfnny [sic].

Let me take a stab at an answer: because he said he prefers LaTeX, and MathType would actually be a downgrade.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[lahvak]

The trouble is that you don't want your authors to submit the paper in the format of the typesetting program, because (a) it's a bugger to convert from one format to another, If they really submit the paper in the format the typesetter uses, this step is unnecessary.

and (b) you're going to have to reset it anyway even if they use the right file format, because you need to run spell-checkers and whatnot on it before typesetting, You can run spell-checker on a LaTeX file just fine. And since it is just a text file, you can run bunch of other filters on it, too.

and you're pretty much guaranteed that the author won't have used journal style[1] (or even set up their text style formats in a rigorous way such that they can be easily converted) Most math journals provide their styles to authors in form of a .sty or .cls file. It is usually very easy for an author to download the file (its a text file, usually very small) and use it in the paper, and as far as I can tell, that is exactly what most authors do.

Most journals will impose a certain style on all papers for consistency: spelling (analyse or analyze?), numbers in the text (nine samples or 9 samples?), reference style (Vancouver or Harvard?), etc. Plus we have the different text styles for different levels of heading, figure legends, etc. Rare indeed is the author who can figure out exactly what the preferred options are and use them consistently, particularly as the paper may have been hawked round several journals before getting accepted by this one. Of course some amount of editing will have to be done on nearly every submission, but for LaTeX files, some of this (spelling) can be done by a filter, and the rest can easily be done by an editor. As far as styles for captions, headings etc, one of the reasons for using LaTeX at the first place is that you don't have to worry about things like that. Simply including the proper journal package or documentclass in the preamble takes care of that, so it is pretty much a no-brainer. Besides, you as an author have an advantage to see pretty much exactly how the paper will look like when published.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[644bd346996]

Oh, so Word can't actually export PS or PDF yet. You still have to use a third-party, system-wide printer driver. That's not news. That's a kludge.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sangui5]

Well, a few (honest) questions, & some comments...

Hello - have you used Office 2007?

Well, it's only been out 4 months. I based everything I said off of previous incarnations of Office, from 2003 (the second latest-n-greatest) to 95 (when WordPerfect started sucking). Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time. And nor will I be using to submit to Nature or Science, apparently, even if it were free.

1. PDF publishing is supported (free)

That's good to hear, and long long missing. Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing? I've had issues with such software producing different output that way (even sometimes products made by Adobe!). Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast? A big problem with the old "print to .PRN, change extension to .PS, then ps2pdf" way of going from Word to PDF was getting bloated, poor quality, and complex PDF files; even Acrobat sometimes will non-sensibly make a crappy PDF.

2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word

Having used BibTeX, I will never go back. There are huge databases of freely available BibTeX format citations. The second runner up, EndNote, hasn't nearly the amount of citations available (although importing BibTeX into EndNote isn't hard). I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.

Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing

I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files. So, regardless of what collaboration service you use, anything from emailing files back and forth to something overly complicated like SourceVault, you can have multiple people editing the same document simultaneously. They just work on different sub-files. I've done it with email, but usually do use RCS to automate the locking support. Unless Office 2007 vastly changes things, Word documents are still monolithic files. That makes it quite difficult to support simultaneous editing; you *need* a concurrent versioning system. And, forgoing large changes in Office 2007, .doc files are still stored as BLOBS, which makes automated commit/merging difficult to impossible.

4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference?

As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include. Style files pretty much guarantee that all of the final product will have a consistent look, and that said look is easy to change across the board. Journals that are either done all in LaTeX or those that hire separate typesetters (for mucho $$$) have the most consistent appearance. Others look a bit like just a bunch of papers glued together.

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,

Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively :)

From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007. Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just a

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Awel]

In my experience the authors don't care, or want to have to bother to care, about getting their styles and language exactly right, and don't want to have to learn a new system in order to do it. See other people's posts on how outwith maths and physics areas most people don't use LaTeX as a matter of course: if you handed them a .sty or .cls they wouldn't know what to do with it. They'll use whatever they normally use, regardless of what they're asked to do, and that's usually Word, Excel and Powerpoint; therefore, we need to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint too. Distressingly.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[PDAllen]

It _can_ include jpeg, since I've tried - but agreed that it's not a clever thing to do. I suppose that if you want something that doesn't really go with vector graphics PNG would do.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[PDAllen]

OK - probably they've updated equation editor since I last tried to use it five years ago.

As far as drawing objects go, Word occasionally screws up drawing positions whether or not they're equations. In any case, I can't send a word document to any journal I want to submit to (combinatorics) and therefore I don't want to use it.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[oatworm]

I can't speak about the rest, but I can overcome #1 rather quickly with a couple of free options:

CutePDF - The basic version is free as in beer; I've used this quite successfully on Office 2000-2003 documents, as well as Visio diagrams. It creates a virtual printer that you print your document to.

PDFCreator - A quick Google search found this Sourceforge project that is GPL'd and was at least reasonably active last year. I've never tried it, but it appears the concept is similar to CutePDF.

Keep in mind that both of these products can print just about anything, including Office documents. Also, as for #3, it's my understanding that Office has a number of collaboration tools specifically to address situations like this, at least from Office 2003 and on. I haven't had the pleasure of working with them, so I'm not entirely sure how well they work. I have used Google Docs and it has a rather nifty collaboration package, however, that seems to mimic the functionality you're describing, with the ability to roll back to previous versions of a document and the like.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[lahvak]

I know several mathematicians who work for Microsoft, and they all use TeX.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[lahvak]

Indeed. I would say that we mathematicians are lucky that for the longest time (and I would argue it is still the case) wordprocessors were simply so unsuitable for our work that we ended up with LaTeX as the preferred format for both authors and publishers.

I would be interested in knowing how many journals outside of the areas of mathematics, physics and perhaps computer science use LaTeX or other TeX based solutions internally. If they do, do they offer their authors an option to submit papers in TeX? Of course if I was in a field where there were no journals accepting submissions in TeX, I probably would not bother learning TeX in the first place.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Jesus_666]

I think the order of priorities should be like this: Braille, Armenian, Linear A, Sütterlin, Gaelic, Hentaigana.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Sapphon]

Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time.

Fair enough. I use OneNote on a Tablet PC on a daily basis, and the improvement in OneNote 2007 over 2003 was easily worth the AUD$75 I got it for (hooray for Australia)

Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing?

As long as you choose the correct page size (the PDF plugin defaults to "Letter", whereas I print to A4), yes.

Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast?

Excellent. I've tried various free PDF Printers (for non-office applications), and this wipes the floor with them. The files sizes are small (unless I've got a whole lot of handwritten stuff, but that's only in OneNote), the fonts are properly embedded, and it's quick: no opening up a second or third dialog box to confirm again -- 'Save as PDF', choose filename, done. A 12 page assignment with charts, graphs, diagrams was converted in under a second, with 118 KB (76 KB as a .doc). The converter is, after all, from Adobe.

I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.

I'll take your word for it, since I haven't used BibTeX. So far I've been happy with the Office offering, but then, I don't write that many articles.

I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files.

You're right, I missed that. However, while I can see where splitting large files up might be of use during simultaneous editing, how often is this an issue? Not simply the simultaneous editing, but having files so large they cause problems? I can't believe this would be much a of deal-breaker in an Office/LaTeX comparison.

As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include.

I haven't (yet) changed templates mid-stream -- or post-stream, even -- so I can't counter that argument. Ah, the joys of arguing about a new product.. /sardonic

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,

Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively :)

The latter = LaTeX

From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007

Rubbish. I don't want to insult any friends of yours, but those people are either power-users whose favourite routines have just been broken, or nitwits. If you know of a feature, it's not hard to find -- and what's more, stuff you didn't know about is there right next to it. Like the Bibliography thing: 1 click on the "Reference" tab gives me options for citations, bibliographies, table of contents, indexes, footnotes, endnotes, cross-referencing, blah blah blah... as soon as Joe Schmoe wants to put in a Footnote, he suddenly learns he can do an Endnote instead. Or a Crossreference. Or a Citation. Etc.
I do a lot of different things with my Office Suite, and needed no more than a day or two to be just as comfortable with it as 2003. After a week, I couldn't imagine going back.

Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just as much as an alternative to moving to Office 2007.

If you

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[shellbeach]

I don't even want to think about the amount of time I've lost playing around with latex2rtf and tex4ht trying to convert my latex papers to an acceptable format. Well if you didn't do that we in production would have to. We don't get paid enough to spend hours faffing about on each paper, and the people in Singapore, whither production is increasingly being moved, certainly don't! By your response it sounds like you're involved in the production of a scientific journal ... If so, can I ask - surely an open, typeset format is more useful to a typeset journal than a proprietary, non-typeset format?

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[The One and Only]

I'm just saying we steal some of their symbols, like the backwards R and stuff, along with stealing from other alphabets.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[SurturZ]

Word 2007 *can* publish to PDF, folks. Why not use the software first before complaining about it?

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[644bd346996]

It's way beyond my budget?

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[SurturZ]

> It's way beyond my budget?

Well then you are entitled to complain about its price. But complaining about missing features that are not actually missing is a bit disingenuous.

I'm no great fan of Office 2007 - I hate the changes to the menu system - but I think it is inappropriate of people to make complaints about its functionality when they haven't even used it.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[gevantry]

MS Office of all flavors Mac or Windows is terrible for document creation if your target is to have the document content go from file to PDF to press. LaTeX is specifically designed to produce content that can go directly PDFs that can be used by Linotronic offset presses with minimal or no intermediary cleaning up. MS Word fills PDFs with an enormous amount of useless formatting shite that has to be flushed from the document before its usable.

But this is not the rationale behind Science and Nature giving the thumbs down to Word 2007. Office's new equation editor abandons the MathML standard, which means equations cannot be reliably edited across platforms or word processors. Compensating for this key incompatibility is more trouble than its worth at the editorial and production end.

My guess is that MS doesn't care. The scientific and technical documents market doesn't compare to the rest of the corporate documents market, so MS will likely just say tough, get with our program.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[nodrogluap]

I agree completely. Additionally, if (heaven forbid), your paper is rejected by a journal, modifying the style for resubmission to another journal is way simpler in LaTeX than in Word. Also, in my experience, the time "in press" (i.e. between acceptance and publication) is usually shorter for LaTeX submissions, because the journal's typesetter has a lot less manual work to do.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[644bd346996]

I wasn't trying to troll about Office. I simply haven't been able to use recent versions to evaluate whether Office is worth my money yet. I asked if Office had PDF exporting, and was told (wrongly, apparently) that it still isn't built in. Sure, I could have googled it, but that really isn't worth my time.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[WilliamSChips]

I meant to say unambiguous.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[grolschie]

>> Then why not upgrade to MathType? Seriously, MathType is so much better than equation editor it's unfnny [sic].

> Let me take a stab at an answer: because he said he prefers LaTeX, and MathType would actually be a downgrade.

Yup! That, and that fact that the scientific journals and book publishers that we submit to only accept .tex files (with .eps and/or .pstex figures). Sometimes they require that we use their latex style file. :-)

There is also something about buying expensive MS Office products, then immediately having to buy upgraded components.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[Kymermosst]

That, and that fact that the scientific journals and book publishers that we submit to only accept .tex files (with .eps and/or .pstex figures). Sometimes they require that we use their latex style file. :-)

I have one journal article under my belt, and we had to submit the camera-ready copy in PDF with the caveat that the printer might want our LaTeX source.

Naturally, the journal supplied their preferred LaTeX style file. It wasn't required, but if you didn't use it they had specific requirements for margins, whitespace, etc.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[JasterBobaMereel]

Sorry have you ever used TeX ?

Tex already does this (and more) and has done for ohh .. Decades ?

Uniformity between body text and equations ... TeX can inline equations ...?

And the reason that people shy away from using it is ... it's buggy and incompatible ...?

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[ljw1004]

TeX doesn't do four-corner whitespace kerning for maths. It only looks at left+right kerning. That's why, in the TeX logo itself, the kerning between "T" and "e" has to be controlled manually. In the new Office, this kind of kerning happens automatically.

It's true that TeX does inline equations. However, it uses an entirely unrelated font family for the equations as compared to the body text. So if you want any formatting in the text to carry over to the maths it's a big effort. And if you switch font family for the text it's a bigger effort to switch font family for the maths. So anything other than Computer Modern is difficult. e.g. you'll use palatino for body text and SlantedEuler for maths, or palatino for body text and Pazo for maths. There aren't many choices and each one requires lots of effort by the maths-font package author.

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[JasterBobaMereel]

"the kerning between "T" and "e" has to be controlled manually." - So it can be controlled ... That's what LaTeX is for ..

The inline and Displayed formulas can be controlled and the fonts can be replaced ... That's what LaTeX is for ..

Re:Word processors seem unsuited for this

[ljw1004]

You think the fonts can be replaced? By anything other than mathpazo or the commercial Lucida fonts from Y&Y? Then you've obviously either never done it yourself or you have terrible typesetting sense (in which case I'm sure Knuth wouldn't appreciate you using his program).

As for being able to control things manually -- well, you can convert Office equations into MathML "manually" too! The topic is about the features and omissions of two pieces of software.

Yet at my job

[Anonymous Coward]

We're still prying some professors away from Word Perfect 5.1.

Re:Yet at my job

[Tribbin]

Word Perfect 5.1 and MS Office 97.

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

The world would be a better place if all energy would have been put in maintaining these and having them interoperating.

Re:Yet at my job

[Planesdragon]

Microsoft's shit-formats are designed to break with version changes.

No. They "were" designed to reflect the internal workings of the program, which means that whenever the program had a signficant change -- that is, a reason to upgrade -- they broke.

The new file format, being no more binary than a zip file, should be much more stable. Especially if they become a formal standard.

Microsoft will offer special free tools for everyone to convert away from plain old ODF to Extended ODF (aka a .doc file with angle brackets around it).

Sheesh.

1: MS's "OpenXML" format is not an outgrowth of ODF. It's an outgrowth of the five-year-old "OfficeML" XML language from Office 2003. All they did was copy OOo's "zip up the XML" idea.

2: MS offering free tools for anyone to convert from ODF to OpenXML, on top of the "safe as ODF" project they're working on for Office, will mean that we finally get what we've wanted for years from MS -- a file format that's independent of the program used to write it. I don't care if they're closed source nonredistributable binary freeware: MS speaking other file formats, and teaching others to speak theirs, is a GOOD THING.

Re:Yet at my job

[asc99c]

Suits from back then would probably be a bit worn by now - shiny patches on the elbows etc. Also, I've put on too much weight to fit into a suit from 1997. Even good maintenance at the dry cleaners wouldn't help that.

Re:Yet at my job

[Tribbin]

Because I like to use Ncurses based apps and use Abiword (kinda like Word 97) for wordprocessing when possible.

I use mc (midnight commander) a lot; it's like norton commander (since '86).

Re:Yet at my job

[marcello_dl]

No. They [office formats] "were" designed to reflect the internal workings of the program...

and that's something most programmers would consider a terrible idea. Wanna keep entrusting your data to MS on the assumption that they won't break compatibility with ODF as soon as it gives them a marketing advantage? good luck to you.

It's always a surprise

[l2718]

That journals accept anything but TeX/LaTeX. Of course some still accept typewritten documents (with a transcription fee), but if you have access to a computer why use Word (or OO writer) for serious writing?

Re:It's always a surprise

[Tribbin]

I'm quite sure that some of the brightest minds would not want to spend time to juggle with Tex. They have better research to do.

Re: It's always a surprise

[Black Parrot]

I'm quite sure that some of the brightest minds would not want to spend time to juggle with Tex. They have better research to do. It's actually quite easy, if you use it regularly.

Re:It's always a surprise

[russotto]

I'm quite sure that some of the brightest minds would not want to spend time to juggle with Tex. They have better research to do.

That's what grad students (or even undergrad assistants) are for.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Tickletaint]

Of course if those people had any clue, they'd realize that file formats matter in the long run...

If you had any clue, you'd drop the fucking condescension and realize that maybe people are smarter than you want to give them credit for—yes, even people in "soft sciences, like economics or parapsychology" (good grief)—and are willing to risk having to retype their documents, should they need them again, ten years down the road. You are everything that people hate about IT, and your unjustified sense of superiority is fucking intolerable.

Re:It's always a surprise

[modmans2ndcoming]

apparently you have never written a long paper with lots of mathematics in it.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Otter]

99.9+% of life science researchers have never even heard of TeX. Even in math-heavy sub-fields, it's rare. Word is overwhelmingly the standard. My limited experience in working with chemists is the same.

Maybe in physics and math TeX is the norm, but nowhere else.

Re:It's always a surprise

[martin-boundary]

Eh? How many people do you know who would actually want to retype their documents ten years later? Most people I've met will rather photocopy or scan their old documents.

My point was that many people are finding that their carefully saved floppies with old work aren't as accessible as they once thought. And that's sad, they should have been told, or at least people should be told *now*.

Re:It's always a surprise

[kazem]

No, that's a really arrogant statement.

You must write in Latex. It's a more powerful for formatting and avoids exactly this problem. And no, they're not too busy to use it because using Word takes up more time in the long run.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

What if they don't have a hard copy to retype it from?
I've changed word-processors several times, usually after enough time to send the old one into obsolescence. If you can no longer use your old word processor, the new word processor doesn't accept the old one's format, and you haven't printed all the documents out, then you will lose documents.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Rakishi]

Well, I'm sure a lot of biologists at Stanford will be surprised to learn they're in a soft science.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Tickletaint]

Well then, you lose documents. Big deal. Most people, in my experience at least, don't have this strange obsession with permanence that seems to dog computer nerds. That doesn't imply some sort of moral judgment on them; if anything, the judgment's on us geeks for our reflexive fear of the ephemeral, when we might benefit ourselves by learning to embrace that which comes and goes.

Re:It's always a surprise

[mechsoph]

I'm quite sure that some of the brightest minds would not want to spend time to juggle with any word processor. They have better research to do.

Seriously though, for anything longer than 3 pages, LaTeX is easier. You just write the content and let it figure out the formatting.

Re:It's always a surprise

[martin-boundary]

Why should they? The soft/hard distinction is about lack of controlled experiments and repeatability, as well as a purely qualitative description of phenomena, rather than a quantitative description suitable for unambiguous predictions.

Whether some Stanford biologists are doing hard or soft science depends entirely on what they do.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Tim]

You'd probably be surprised how many of the "brightest minds" spend eight hours a day doing needless grunt work to accomodate the many peculiarities of Microsoft Office.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Sycraft-fu]

I do support for an engineering department and Word is the standard there too. TeX is used, but basically only be a few professors that learned it back in the day and refuse to change. From the software we install for them, I'm guessing they actually submit the papers in PDF format, not TeX format. For everyone else, it is MS Word with Mathtype for equations. Regardless of if this is the "right" or "best" way, this seems to be the way it is. The number of TeX using faculty is down to three, and all are rather elderly.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Seriously though, for anything longer than 3 pages, LaTeX is easier. You just write the content and let it figure out the formatting.

Which is fine if the formatting it "figures out" is reasonable, as it usually is. If not, though, you're basically screwed, because manual formatting in LaTeX is what they use to scare people who are already consigned to a fiery underworld for all eternity...

Re:It's always a surprise

[lahvak]

If they don't want to spend time to juggle with TeX, they will not want to spend time to juggle with the MS equation editor. Anyway, most of the brightest mind probably have a secretary who can juggle with TeX for them.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

/me loads up technical document written using Word 95 while he was at university more than a decade ago. It works fine in any recent version of Word, and indeed in OpenOffice Writer.

/me tries running a technical document from the same period through his recently updated TeX installation. It fails: a couple of the packages are apparently obsolete now, and either no longer available via CTAN or at least no longer set up as standard with a mainstream TeX installation.

Sorry, looks like you're wrong on that one.

Re:It's always a surprise

[c_sd_m]

At least in my field (operations research / math / cs / machine intelligence) the journals (e.g., INFORMS: http://templates.pubs.informs.org/) provide not only formatting guidelines but template and Latex style files. In that case it's just a matter of downloading the style file, sticking it in the folder with the latex source, and recompiling it. Most even provide instructions in case your run into trouble.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Somnus]

Once you get used to it nothing is faster for typesetting mathematical content or Feynman diagrams, even GUI tools.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Johnny Mnemonic]

When I supported life science researchers, not only was MS Word the standard, but we had a site license for EndNote. Does LaTeX have a similar plugin or ability? Even further, does it have the ability to design custom workflow plugins?

Re:It's always a surprise

[Sycraft-fu]

Well fortunately, random guys on the Internet with uninformed opinions aren't the ones that give out grants. Given that the professors seem to do quite well getting grants and getting published, I think it all works out just fine. Perhaps it isn't so much a matter of competence but rather some professors realising that getting the job done quickly and easily is better accomplished with Word and Mathtype.

Re:It's always a surprise

[jgrahn]

When I supported life science researchers, not only was MS Word the standard, but we had a site license for EndNote. Does LaTeX have a similar plugin or ability?

It has BibTeX for handling citations and references, if that's what you mean. But you don't need site licenses (or the concept of a "site") to use it, and noone calls it a plugin.

Re:It's always a surprise

[ceoyoyo]

My advisor (biomedical engineering) made it a condition of being his student that I not write my thesis in TeX.

I can understand. Word is a pain but people's TeX files can be just as bad. Don't have some obscure macro someone used? Oh, your document won't compile.

I use TeX on the Mac to write equations which are then turned into nice PDFs that can be dropped into any editor I like. The code is attached to the PDF as metadata so they can even be edited and recompiled.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Angostura]

Oops, your prejudices are showing.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Angostura]

Biology used to be a soft science, but no more. One of my favourite quotes when I was a biologist was from one of the 1950s particle physicists - Rutherford, I think. "There are three sorts of science: Biology. Chemistry and stamp collecting"

Re:It's always a surprise

[belmolis]

Every serious TeX user that I have known keeps a personal copy of any non-standard packages, as I do. I have often printed out documents that I wrote 20 years ago with no more difficulty than changing /usr2/poser/bin/tex to /home/poser/bin/tex in the include statements. People who use Latex rather than raw Tex generally have an even easier time of it as they are less likely to be using unusual macro packages.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Rakishi]

Well these particular biologists were working with cancer genes based on micro-array experiments. Of course if my old adviser is to be trusted then that the vast majority of the Stanford biologists used word for their work.

So either your statement is quite visibly false (it's quite likely that most biologists use word if those at stanford do so) or they'll all be quite surprised to know they're in a soft science. If you feel like backing up your generalization of whom uses word then please do provide your own point of reference and what experience causes you to have it. It's like an e-penis contest at this point so we may as well start putting the cards down on the table.

I have on my side my own experience, the experience of my adviser, the experiences of something like a half dozen posters in this article and apparently two very well know science journals. And I doubt science journals probably flip a coin to pick the format for their publications but rather use what most of their submitters use themselves (and that is easy for them to process). The many posts of math+physics journals using latex (as that is what mathematicians and physicists use) backs up that point fairly well I think.

Re:It's always a surprise

[doublegauss]

Maybe in physics and math TeX is the norm, but nowhere else.

Well, at least economics should be added to the list. Most economics journals are typeset in LaTeX. Some offer you the possibility to send your paper in other formats, but that's just because they do the conversion for you. Working papers are practically all typeset in LaTeX.

And, yes, I am an academic economist (econometrician, to be precise).

Re:It's always a surprise

[gowen]

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting".

If you're going to claim a favourite quote, at least recall enough of it to get the meaning right. Rutherford believed the harder ends of Chemistry and Biology to be subsets of physics, and the rest of those disciplines to be irrelevant. Organising taxonomies, for example, would be stamp collecting.

Re:It's always a surprise

[martin-boundary]

Uhm, that's my statement:

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.

I'm not exactly sure why you think that a group of biologists who use Word are somehow a visibly false case of that statement, but I'll take your word for it ;-)

Re:It's always a surprise

[l3v1]

99.9+% of life science researchers have never even heard of TeX

99.9% of scientists you happen to know. Certainly not the ones I know - and they are not mathematicians. Speaking for myself I always start by searching for TeX templates at a given journal and/or conference. And, not really surprisingly, the most of the somewhat quality ones all have TeX templates available. It eases our time, and it eases their time spent with the paper. It's nothing wrong with a journal choosing a certain type of submission format (be it a certain Word version or else) and I certainly don't see how this is worth a story submission. It's a journal's own prerogative to ask for whichever formats they see fit and it's the author's responsibility to adhere to those guidelines. That's all.
 

Re:It's always a surprise

[xtracto]

MS Word the standard, but we had a site license for EndNote. Does LaTeX have a similar plugin or ability?

As another guy said, Bibtex is the Latex bibliography database. Although it is only a database file; I suggest JabRef as a really good reference database based on Bibtex, it can interact with Lyx, WinEDT and others (Too bad it does not interact with TecNixcenter).

Re:It's always a surprise

[ldj]

Perhaps it isn't so much a matter of competence but rather some professors realising that getting the job done quickly and easily is better accomplished with Word and Mathtype.

From my experience and observations over the past 20 years, using TeX/LaTeX has *always* been faster and easier than using any wordprocessor for documents larger than a few pages or containing significant mathematics.

I'd say the real issues are pretty obvious: Most professors aren't even aware that LaTeX exists or they're afraid of any sort of markup language (even though a couple of days using it often convinces people that it is easy enough). Over the years, I've introduced many people to LaTeX. If I could get them to spend a week using it, they didn't go back to a word processor except when forced.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Fred_A]

And no, they're not too busy to use it because using Word takes up more time in the long run.

It's not even in the long run if you're doing something that TeX or one of its variants is remotely good at. If your work has bibliographical data, lots of references, chemistry, math, music, etc. You've saved the time spend learning the few functions you need in a week or so.

I haven't had the need to use it for quite some time and I can understand that lots of people find it intimidating but the awesomeness and ease of use of TeX (well, properly wrapped up in the right set of macros) cannot be overstated. After all this time there still isn't anything that comes close.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sure, but that relies on anticipating, N years in advance, what the "non-standard" packages will be in the future. In the LaTeX world, some very useful packages that were typically supplied with installations as standard a decade ago have been superceded by more generic, future-proof or otherwise adaptable alternatives. Maybe in ten years' time, LaTeX3 will finally have materialised, and almost everything from today will only run with backward compatibility modes; who knows?

It also relies on your personal copies of things never failing, which isn't 100%, particularly if you ever trusted CD-Rs for back-ups. Of course, you can probably find copies of most of them hidden away on CTAN, or on someone's personal home page, but then you'll probably be able to find filters that will convert the most popular document format in the world to newer formats for a long time, too.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Otter]

99.9% of scientists you happen to know. Certainly not the ones I know - and they are not mathematicians.

I didn't say "scientists", I said "life science researchers". And I stand by what I said. The overwhelming majority of life science researchers have never heard of TeX, outside of some very small computational and theoretical niches. The premier molecular biology journal, for example, requests "Word, RTF, and TXT".

Re:It's always a surprise

[WilliamSChips]

LaTeX itself is a plugin to a system called TeX. Custom plugins are definitely allowed.

Re:It's always a surprise

[StressedEd]

For the Mac users out there BibDesk is fantastic.

Re:It's always a surprise

[budgenator]

The output from LaTeX/TeX is a DVI file, DeVice Independent file, theoretically there were printers that would take the .DVI formated files and print them directly at an astounding 600 dpi resolution, everybody else had either daisy-wheel or 9 pin dot matrix printers. The difference in quality between a DVI printer and the state of the art dot matrix or daisy-wheel printer was breathtaking, the DVI format is much more like postscript than anything else.
Now-a-days the DVI is ran through a programs dvips to convert to postscript or dvipdf to convert to a PDF format which is then usually distributed or printed.

To be honest the wife just took English a while back and the styles she had to use was significantly dumbed-down to a much more casual style to accommodate the short-comings of Word, as compared to the more formal styles when I went to college, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that those few old-farts you have there don't consider the youngsters to be vulgar and semi-literate

Re:It's always a surprise

[Jesus_666]

Even further, does it have the ability to design custom workflow plugins?

TeX is a Turing-complete language. You can write pretty much everything you want in it.

Re:It's always a surprise

[pyite]

Well fortunately, random guys on the Internet with uninformed opinions aren't the ones that give out grants.

It's hardly uninformed.

Perhaps it isn't so much a matter of competence but rather some professors realising that getting the job done quickly and easily is better accomplished with Word and Mathtype.

I'll put up an experienced TeX user against any Word/Mathtype guru any day and I would bet the TeX user can win in speed and accuracy.

Of course, there are the intangibles, like not being effectively tied to a single editor, that make TeX more attractive.

Re:It's always a surprise

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I can't open a Word document written *last week* by somebody 2 desks over with a slightly different version of MS Word -- and my version of MS Word is just *newer* than his. When I can open them, they're frequently not "100% accurate". What's your secret?

I don't have one. The last time I saw that kind of compatibility cock-up was the format shift about three versions back (on Windows), and that seemed to be patched up long ago. Which versions are you using, and what sort of formatting or features don't import correctly? Are you sure you haven't got one PC formatting for A4 and the other for US Letter paper or something, with the result that some of the pagination changes slightly?

I really can't relate to any of your other points either, with the possible exception of version control. Word itself does have some features for tracking changes and the like, but it's true, if you usually use a text-based diffing tool then Word documents (like any binary format) aren't version control friendly. Whether that's a problem with Word or a problem with your approach to version control is a different question.

backlash

[minus_273]

Is it just me or is the new Office UI AND incompatible format coupled with the requirement of 3D cards to run Vista creating a perfect storm of backlash. If any one of these things were to come alone it would not have been this bad, but judging by the reaction from several companies including my own, this i driving people to look at OSX as a viable option.

Re:backlash

[jollyreaper]

Is it just me or is the new Office UI AND incompatible format coupled with the requirement of 3D cards to run Vista creating a perfect storm of backlash. If any one of these things were to come alone it would not have been this bad, but judging by the reaction from several companies including my own, this i driving people to look at OSX as a viable option. Anyone who predicts the end of Microsoft risks looking like an idiot since these predictions have been going on for decades and yet Microsoft is still here and as strong as ever. That being said, allow me to risk looking like an idiot by agreeing with you. :) I don't see Microsoft going away anytime soon but I think that there are some risks for them out there now that simply did not exist in the past.

1. Office is Microsoft's bread and butter. Everybody used Office so anyone wanting to work with other people had to be in the Office game. Even if there were alternatives that might have been better from a technical perspective, Office was already the 800lb gorilla. People were no more going to switch from Office than they would switch from QWERTY keyboards.
2. The international push by governments to move to an open document format is huge. To do business with these governments, now you're forced to use a different word processor. This sort of mandate helps to redefine the playing field. As you said, on it's own this is not a ballbuster for Microsoft.
3. As you mentioned, Office 2007 is a pain in the ass.
4. Vista sucks.
5. This is another killer factor: you can get Linux on the desktop now, and not just for geeks. I used to scratch my head wondering what people on Slashdot were talking about when they said they had Grandma running on Linux. Not anymore. The latest friendly distros like Ubuntu are ready for normal people to use. Everything they need to see is there, open, friendly, no muss, no fuss. If somebody told me I had to explain Ubuntu to my mom, my first response would no longer be "shoot me now."

While I don't think any of this is going to lead to the inevitable collapse of Microsoft in the coming weeks, I think it could be the start of a downward slide, at least in terms of operating system and office app markets. Historically speaking, powerful and unstoppable kingdoms/empires/corporations tend not to be destroyed from outside but from within. Laziness, neglect, a lack of imagination and vision, all of these things will hollow out the entity until a trifling problem could become the crisis that finally brings the end. The problems we're seeing right now could be the start of that. But given Microsoft's size and clout, I think we'll be waiting a long time for the final curtain.

Re:backlash

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's just you.

Afterall, w(ho)tf owns a computer in 2007 that doesn't have hardware acceleration? .. and if you TRULY MUST run Vista on the PC you bought circa 1996, just turn Aero off, Vista works just fine in 2d.

As for the new Office UI, it is superior to the old in many ways. I realise that that idea is very hard for you to accept (not least b/c all you *nux/FOSS gearheads don't WANT to accept it), but I've been using Office 2k7 for a coupla months and I love it. I think if more ppl would quit pouting about the simple fact that it's DIFFERENT and actually spend some time getting used to it, they'd find that Ribbons and Task-groups are significantly superior to (and vastly more intuitive than) the many-layered, nested menus ever were.

As for the "incompatible" format, I'm not sure what you mean. Given that there's a FREE and easy-to-apply patch available here that enables any version of Office >= 2000 to use the new XML formats, AND since every Office 2k7 application has a highly visible and easy-to-use "Save as Office 97-2003" option, I really don't know what you're trying to say, oh, wait, I forgot about FUD, riiiight, I got it now...

-AC

Re:backlash

[sid0]

You can even set the old doc format as the goddamn DEFAULT to save files in.

The best thing about Office 07 is that it exposes a lot more functionality than older versions did, in a very logical format. Amazingly useful things like "Track Changes" that even an intermediate user couldn't find earlier, can now be used by a newbie.

As for REMOVING those hidden details, well, there's a great little "Inspect Document" feature that allows you to completely remove them.

Re:backlash

[ticklish2day]

It is just you. We've upgraded to Office 2007 on XP already (it works perfectly) with minimal training costs and issues.

Re:backlash

[digitalchinky]

Plenty of businesses still own and run old hardware - it still works so why upgrade. In your world the problem is insignificant simply because you have the money available in such quantities that you don't need to care and can afford to be arrogant to the issues others face. The problem is simplistic, how do the remaining masses address your oddball (incompatible) MS-2007 xml document format. Is there a patch or plug-in for Abiword, applixware, koffice, gnome office, openoffice, frame maker, etc, etc, etc. Explain to me why I should lay out the bucks just to run an MS based machine to deal with your standard factory acceptance of the microsoft way.

Sure, there's a free one for other versions of Microsoft Office, but almost none for any other suite. Your logic is intriguing, all us nutjob nux/FOSS gearheads are so apathetic we don't want to accept it simply because it's different. No concept that some of us might be using other operating systems or have a different bottom line that dictates how and why we do things.

The rest of the world isn't as cut and dry as your tiny one.

Re:backlash

[EraserMouseMan]

That's hillarious! An editor is using an old version of Word and can't open Word 2007 docs. Subsequently Slashdotters are predicting Microsoft's doom.

Re:backlash

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Is it just me or is the new Office UI AND incompatible format coupled with the requirement of 3D cards to run Vista creating a perfect storm of backlash.

Sorry, but it's pretty much just you.

For one thing, of those people I know who have actually tried using Office 2007 for a while, nearly all seem to prefer the new UI after a fairly short amount of time getting used to it. I haven't used it much myself yet, so I don't have a personal opinion either way, but it certainly sounds like Microsoft's usability people did their homework well on this one.

For another thing, you can download a freebie tool from the Microsoft web site that lets Office 2003 read Office 2007 format files. (If you're using Office 2003 and Windows XP, this can also be useful as a way to get Microsoft's nice new fonts even if you don't need to open the newer document formats.) Of course, you can still save in other formats from Office 2007 itself.

Your final point about Vista is off-topic and irrelevant to this discussion, but it's pretty much without merit anyway since you can disable the graphic-intensive display options in Vista if you want, and just about any decent graphics card from the past few years will handle Aero.

Re:backlash

[ClosedSource]

"Plenty of businesses still own and run old hardware - it still works so why upgrade."

I'm sure that's true, but I doubt that the kind of business that uses old hardware is also the kind that does a lot of document interchange with others. It's probably been using the same non-FOSS word processor for a long time.

Re:backlash

[Angostura]

Ummm, I can tell you now that many publishers will get away with the oldest hardware available, outside of the art and layout department. And yes, the do a lot of document interchange with authors.

Re:backlash

[MickDownUnder]

What a total pile of twaddle...

Microsoft 2007 formats are compatible with Office 2003, Office XP, and Office 2000, all you need to do is download and install this patch.

Microsoft has actually made a commendable effort in providing support for existing versions of office. The problems being referenced here have actually already been addressed. This fix comes not from Microsoft but from someone who has utilised the open framework that is Office 2007 to resolve the issue.

Office 2007 formats are basically zip files containing xml files all with schemas that have been submitted to the ECMA standards body. Combined with sdk and api inbuilt into the .NET framework Office 2007 has turned office into a very powerful development platform for document processing.

Anyone reacting as you've described I'm afraid is doing so as a result of total incompetence and complete ignorance.

I think migration to Office 2007 in the corporate world is going to be relatively swift (inspite of the support for previous versions of office offered by Microsoft). Migration to Office 2007 will occur because it is a great product that is more open and easy to extend and manipulate than any over version of office (as demonstrated in David Carlisle blog). It will also be a no brainer for any organisation using Sharepoint as it offers good integration with sharepoint.

Re:backlash

[minus_273]

almost all business desktops and laptops do not have harware accelerations. They come with intel GMA integrated graphics.

Re:backlash

[Maxo-Texas]

Not at all-- our hardware is on a 3 year cycle. and the older machines are used by non-programmers from 4-6 years out. Huge multi-billion dollar corporation.

And they don't want people doing games and hardware acceleration was not required until Vista. It'll take a while to work its way through the company.

Re:backlash

[vuffi_raa]

I work on a ton of computers without acceleration- literally I manage a whole room full of computers to process data- and none of them have accelerated graphics cards because for business apps you don't need them- but to upgrade them we are looking at- what 12k - 15k for the room? and that is just my dept- we start moving out to the rest of the company and you are looking at a 150k to 200k price tag for our startup- for what- to use an incompatable app?

How strange

[jc42]

Microsoft has been pushing "upgrades" that break files from earlier releases for a couple decades now, and I've never heard of a publisher (or any other organization) standing up to them before like this. Generally, they just go along meekly, since "that's what computers are like, y'know".

What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?

I'm assuming that they haven't actually converted to non-MS (or non-IBM) systems. That would be just too bizarre to believe. Do you think that they've actually noticed that non-MS systems can usually read files from 20 years ago without problems? Is this some sign of a pending movement in which more organizations will actually start standing up to the Market Leader?

Nah; it can't be. Something very strange must be going on behind the scene.

Re:How strange

[dal20402]

Word has only changed file formats once in recent memory, between Word 95 and 97 (or 6.0 and 98 in the Mac versions).

I remember exactly the same issues that time. Word 97 .doc format was not widely accepted until at least 1999. Once Vista and Office 2007 are widely adopted, which will occur within a three-year replacement cycle, and Office 2008 for Mac is well established, the new formats will become standard and there will no longer be a peep of protest, whether or not MS has fixed the issues with the formats.

Re:How strange

[hey hey hey]

Microsoft has been pushing "upgrades" that break files from earlier releases for a couple decades now, and I've never heard of a publisher (or any other organization) standing up to them before like this. Generally, they just go along meekly, since "that's what computers are like, y'know".

What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?

Without knowing anything about how Science or Nature actually publishes things, I suspect that in the last couple of years they have gone for more and more automation. Where in years gone past, somebody had to actually convert manuscripts from a submitted form on paper into something that could be typeset/printed, now this can be done with the raw manuscript. Now that they have these nice systems in place (Science can accept Word, WordPerfect or LaTex), they probably really REALLY don't want to go back to any kind of manual processes (not only costs more, but it is an obvious source of errors). So, the usual reason, money.

Re:How strange

[BCW2]

Take that a step further and really wonder why MS got as big as it did. IBM came out with the AS400 in 1988 and promised that programs written for it would never be obsolete. A textile company in NC is using a program written for an IBM S36 on the latest version of the AS400. The program is 25 years old! Big companies use custom software and can't afford the hassles of the shrinkwrap world. Think about a 20 year old program that has been maintained and modified for that timeperiod it might be a million dollar program today. Payroll, accounting, employee records, these are things that require constant modification due to laws and rules changing every year. It's simple, maintain your apps and IBM upgrades the OS without ever having to redo anything.

Re:How strange

[Frosty Piss]

There is no reason to expect a company to support old formats forever. There are many rational reasons to prefer Word over OpenOffice, which is why many people do. Someday, that may change, but that day has not arrived.

Re:How strange

[JuliaNZ]

What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?

If you read the article you'll see it's because Office 2007 fucks up equations and some Greek characters, and documents can't be further revised or published in the journals after they've passed through this version of Office. It's not an ideological battle, it's that the software doesn't allow them to publish those papers properly.

Re:How strange

[Belial6]

If they are trying to sell their product to businesses that might have to go back to 'forever' to retrieve data, there certainly is a good reason. I'm waiting for the first time a company gets sued for using MS Office by their shareholders because they lost a large lawsuit due to an inability to retrieve documents. Today, you can still get your hands on old copies of Word, and old copies of Windows that the old Word will run on. That might not always be the case. If someone needs to get some documents out of Word 1.0, they likely are hitting the piracy trail today. As things like software dialing home gets more and more prevalent, that might not be even possible 10 years from now. Storing corporate documents, that should be archived, in Word is simply irresponsible.

Re:How strange

[fermion]

You are, of course, correct. However that does not change the fact that MS significantly degrades the user experience, at least for a while, and chases customers off. In point of fact, no one really complains about MS incompatibility, at least in the real world, because it is not an issue. After all, word is mostly used to create simple, time limited, documents that few people will read and few people will remember. In most case, if one has to read a and older MS word document, one can find a machine that can read it.

But what about those of us who are not just typing memos. I recall trying to send out MS Word 97 documents when everyone else was using 2000. Great deal of difficulties getting the documents to work properly. What I did find, however, was that if I used another office suite, and saved to MS Word, there were no issues. I also discovered that MS Excel would not work properly with so forms, but other Office suites worked fine.

Here is what I am saying. After 15 years, MS lost me as paying customer because MS had no respect for my time. I would have upgraded to the next version of MS office as soon as I could have, but MS decisions pushed me away, and now instead of being a promoter of MS Office, I truly believe that 80% of the users, it provides insufficient functionality for the cost, mostly because of the discontinuities created by the upgrade cycle. Now, mind you, I dealt with discontinuities, even between MS DOS and MS Windows, but now the competitors do a better job.

Here the common response to this. MS does not need me as customer. It can live with primarily corporate customers. Here is my response. IBM thought they could live off the corporate customer, pissing off every one else, even pissing on corporate because inertia would be too strong of a force. IBM was wrong, and MS benefiting for that wrong headed thinking. IBM is still around, but has to work very hard for it's money. It is my belief that it makes as much sense to buy a MS loaded machine now as it did to buy a PC jr.

Re:How strange

[random0xff]

"What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?"

Choice. In the article they mention ODF as an alternative.

Re:How strange

[Man Eating Duck]

Something very strange must be going on behind the scene.

Something is going on, but it's not very strange.

I work at an academic publishing house. The scientists submit in all sorts of formats, and we handle it. They rarely have any computer experience to speak of, and use whatever pops up when they hunt for a word processor on their menu. It's not their concern, neither should it be.

As much as I would love for them to use specific formats, the response would be "Huh? No, I locked my office before leaving, it's not open". We cope with it.

Re:How strange

[jc42]

Sounds reasonable. I'd guess that many publishers try to pick a standard such as TeX and find software to convert other formats to that. But this has to be difficult for undocumented formats like MS Word. MS isn't exactly cooperative about documenting the internal details of their formats.

Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors! :)

Sorry; I can't find anything to correct.

Re:How strange

[kabocox]

Nah; it can't be. Something very strange must be going on behind the scene.

What's so strange? Due to this, Nature and Science could be getting a large discount for upgrades to Office 2007 soon.

As a Mac guy...

[imamac]

...I would love to say "Ha Ha! Proof that Microsoft's end is near." But this is typical for version changes. If you didn't yet spent the thousands of $$ to upgrade, then you won't be able to read the newer formats. It's that simple. The only real story here is they are pushing ODF, which is nice to see.

Re:As a Mac guy...

[laffer1]

Your feelings about Apple are my feelings about Linux. Most of the reasons I feel negatively about Linux are no longer true and yet I hold on to them. The difference between you and me is that I see reasons to recommend Linux despite my feelings. I can see the good elements of Linux as well as the bad.

I've been using Word 2007 to write papers for an online class this semester. I must save them in word 2003/97 format, but I must say its a great product. I still prefer pages for casual writing and the Mac office interface is better than 2003. I think I like the Word 2007 interface much better than any other versions. The only complaint I have is dealing with margin changes for portions of the document. I miss the old bar at the top.

Before anyone suggests Open Office, realize that I don't have it ported to MBSD and I hate it in Windows and Mac OS. It feels like office 97 but the menu positions are wrong. I would have preferred they make a unique interface like Lotus and Apple did.

Re:As a Mac guy...

[2cv]

Meh. Files in Word 2007, Excel 2007, and Powerpoint 2007 formats can be opened, edited, and saved directly in the respective Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003 applications after installation of a Compatibility Pack. It doesn't cost you a thing. It's that simple.

you mean they even take office?

[cbc1920]

I thought that they barely took office format at all anymore. I was under the impression that they preferred LaTeX. Everyone that I know in my department (Aerospace Engineering) would not think of using anything but LaTeX for journal submissions- to do otherwise is cruel to the typesetters and asking for your article to look horrible.

In general, a WYSIWYG format, whether ODF or DOC format, will not be what you get in the journal, since any good journal will do some heavy formatting changes in order to make your article fit and play nice with the rest of them.

Re:you mean they even take office?

[Alan Shutko]

There are a few reasons that Science and Nature prefer Word to TeX. First, they are not nearly as equation-heavy as a pure physics or mathematics journal would be. Second, they've got a publishing workflow that takes Word as an input and ties into the rest of their technology. They don't care how well Word typesets documents, they want common input formats that they can rip information out of and edit themselves.

TeX and LaTeX are great if you've got substantial finicky needs (esp around equations) that you really need the author to get right, and to be able to carry that through. However, to support that comes at a price. As the TUGBoat editors experience on an ongoing basis, publishing a journal composed of arbitrary TeX content from different authors is difficult. Different authors may use conflicting macro packages, or it may be harder to coerce each into the house style.

Re:you mean they even take office?

[Falstius]

IEEE requests documents as PDF. They provide a .doc template to help you get the formatting correct, as well as guidelines for tex.

The main incompatibility between ODF and Word for technical writting is equations. Word completely fails on equations in documents exported from OpenOffice.

Re:you mean they even take office?

[everphilski]

Funny, cause AIAA (aerospace engineering journal) takes submissions in Word ... templates are online here (yes, written three journal articles - and thesis - in Word. It really isn't that hard and they all came out great.)

Re:you mean they even take office?

[bbtom]

LaTeX isn't just good for equations and other science-specific data - LyX and a decent BibTeX manager (I use BibDesk on OS X) are a great way of keeping large volumes of material well-managed for work in any academic field. Without LaTeX/BibTeX/LyX, I would have probably have never finished my (fairly research heavy) undergraduate dissertation (philosophy).

Now I have switched to XML-based formats and use XSL-FO and Apache FOP to turn it in to PDF/PostScript. I have complete control over the whole process and all of it is reusable, semantic and shareable. Add to that the use of the Web to share data openly, and we could potentially hit a nice sweet spot free of both Microsoft Office and it's lame duck open source clones. Part of the attraction of the open source world is getting away from Word and replacing it with semantic markup where I say what I *mean* rather than say what I want the document to look like. That's why OpenOffice et al. are utterly pointless. Open source should be about replacing bad paradigms rather than just porting.

I can't wait until scholarly journals just sit down and write an XML (RELAX NG?) schema and people use a schema-aware editor to write their stuff.

Re:you mean they even take office?

[TheEmptySet]

It is simple to coerce authors into the house style. Make your house style file public and demand that people use it. For example The Journal of Topology and practically every other maths journal does this.

Re:you mean they even take office?

[bensch128]

Now I have switched to XML-based formats and use XSL-FO and Apache FOP to turn it in to PDF/PostScript. I have complete control over the whole process and all of it is reusable, semantic and shareable.

So how do you specify your "XML-based format" if you don't use ODF or OOXML?
Your logic for why ODF is a "lame duck open source clone" is needs more justification.

Ben

Re:you mean they even take office?

[bbtom]

Your logic for ODF is a "lame duck open source clone" is needs more justification.

I wasn't talking about ODF specifically, I was talking about OpenOffice - the file format is pretty much irrelevant. OpenOffice, NeoOffice, StarOffice and all these other free, open-source office clones are still buying in to the paradigm they have inherited from Microsoft - namely, WYSIWYG presentation-based markup. I reject that. As a writer, I do not want to markup "this is italic" or "this is 16pt bold" or whatnot, I want to markup "this is a heading, this is a paragraph etc." For me, whether it's got 1in margins or 2in is irrelevant. The design of OpenOffice is one which puts forward that WYSIWYG paradigm. I don't think in 'pages' or 'character spacing' or 'margins', I think in ideas and how they relate and are organised.

So how do you specify your "XML-based format" if you don't use ODF or OOXML?

Simple. I use an XML-based format that's not ODF or OOXML. Have you seen the size of the OOXML specification? It's like 900 pages long stretched across three different namespaces and Microsoft chose XSD as their schema langauge, even though something like RELAX NG would have been a *lot* saner.

What actual format I use is something I have yet to decide - I've tried DocBook but found it too heavy, and TEI is a little bit too backwards-facing (it's designed for archivists and librarians, it seems). XHTML is kind of light enough for my uses, but there's no good XHTML->FO stylesheets that I've seen, so you are reliant on browsers for turning it in to a PDF.

I may simply specify my own format using a RELAX NG schema and use that. That way, how I write will be determined by me, not by Bill Gates. The XML stack is quite an attractive proposition for me because it's de-facto open - RNG schema, XSL and FO are all viewable, and the document is just text with some extra guff added. Plus it's really, really well internationalized, which is something other data formats struggle with. I can also 'pull-in' other formats like MathML or XForms and embed them within my format.

I feel the same about office software quite generally - it feels inefficient to use it. For instance, I never use spreadsheets. If I have data that needs processing, I'll pop open a terminal window and write a Python script. I have control over the data that is being processed and what happens with it. If I need a graph, I'll type 'import matplotlib' and make one. If the data is not merely temporary, I'll put it up on the web as some kind of data file that others can reuse. That data file will have semantic value of some kind (the elements and attributes will describe where it means rather than just where it is on an Excel grid).

If I need to give a presentation, I'll use Eric Meyer's S5 and a generator script that makes it work with an open source outliner I use. Databases? MySQL (or eXist). The 'office' paradigm does nothing for me, and it's something to be actively worked around. I have access to both Office and OpenOffice on both the Mac and on Linux and I *never* use them. The home-grown ways are just so much more efficient for me.

Now, some idiot is going to say "but you can't expect everyone to just drop Word and Excel and use Python and/or XSL". That may be so. But for me, I'm not going to waste my life working with bad software. If the software I am using sucks, I *will* write my own to replace it. One size does not fit all. With regard to academics, I think that if you are intelligent enough to be splitting atoms or deconstructing 19th century poetry, you are intelligent enough to be able to use a piece of software that's not made by Microsoft. Journals should take the lead here. People actually aren't stupid - almost everyone, however they may fail in school, usually gets a driver's license - because there's an economic motivation to having a driver's lice

Re:you mean they even take office?

[Lehk228]

OOo allows you to tell it what something is rather than how it should look, the "apply style" dropdown is right next to the font selection, if you select "more" from the list you will get a floating tool window with a list of styles to use.

Re:you mean they even take office?

[bensch128]

I understand that you want to have total control and flexibility over the documents produced but how are you going to share them after you've made them. You can't expect a lay-user to go through a custom built XML document and understand what was written, much less the meaning and context of the communication. If you want to succeed in communicating with other people, you need to share a common media with them (aka IM, IRC, phone, ODF, doc, etc.) Thats why M$ is so desperate to maintain control of the medium of document exchange. They can charge a fortune for the tools to produce OOXML.

Thats why its important to use a more reasonable format, ODF, even if its not perfect.

I do understand the pain of WYSIWYG editors (I hate bashing doc files into shape) but if you stick to styles and occasionally add character mark-up, it's easier. At least with ODF, there is 2+ major suites supporting it and it does use the best-of-breed formats (odf, mathml, svg, musicml, png etc, all in a hierarchy in a zip file). I like it's philosophy and goals.

I think I'm beginning to see the OOXML vs. ODF conflict as a block-by-block, city-by-city, country-by-country turfwar. Each side wants it's format as the common format of editable documents.

Cheers
Ben Schleimer

Re:you mean they even take office?

[bbtom]

You make a very good point. I guess ODF is okay, although it's quite a bit more complex than I would like and the RELAX NG schema for ODF doesn't 'just work' in my XML editor. It's not something I've ruled out.

Re:you mean they even take office?

[PDAllen]

Most journals get round this by giving you a list of things that you may not do in the latex you send them (no hard breaks, no font changing beyond italics emphasis), or having a public house-style package (or both). Then it's pretty easy to house-style it.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Ngarrang]

Why? Because some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use. They type in their stuff, use the equation editor, etc, done.

The average user cattle doesn't care about the data format war, only the technical folks. It is a power that should not be wielded lightly, this format war.

It's not important that ...

[Tribbin]

It's not important that people will use open-source software for writing documents.

It's more important that MS supports ODF.

Office 2007 is Irritating right now...

[Eric Damron]

My department has started getting Office 2007 files and we find it irritating. We are not ready to go there yet. We have many macros that interface to our database that must be rewritten. It will probably be a year or so before our small I.S. department has time to convert to Office 2007.

The amount of money that will be spent to rewrite code that works with Word 2007 will not be insignificant and the real down side is that we get virtually nothing for our effort!

Re:Office 2007 is Irritating right now...

[shis-ka-bob]

This is interesting. We are looking at upgrading Office, and both Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org 2.2 are being considered. I had thought that Office 2007 would be able to use existing macros, but if this is not the case it could help tip the scales in favor of OO.o. After some study, it turns out that OO.o has templates that are more capable that Word (See thesis instructions from MIT or David Wheeler's blog. (Even if you don't want to write a thesis, they do represent a highly structured documents with stringent standards. This is something of an acid test for document formating.) The OO.o master documents are also a selling point, since dividing large written works into chapters is a time-honored approach to collaboration. If MSO 2007 doesn't import existing macros better than OO.o, its going to be harder for management to justify the considerable upgrade costs.

Re:Office 2007 is Irritating right now...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Just out of interest, why are you considering moving to new software? What's wrong with whatever you've been using until now? Office 2007 will be expensive, and may represent at least some loss of productivity for a while as people adjust to the new UI. OOo is full of silly bugs and limitations, and is simply not good enough (IME) for use in a professional environment with more than trivial requirements. To be sure, both have their good points too, but what does either package offer over whatever you're currently using that you actually need?

Incidentally, it sounds as though you're not very familiar with these newer products yet and still doing your research. If that's the case, I advise caution in trusting reviews you find on the net. OpenOffice reviews hosted on OSS-friendly sites, such as the Bruce Byfield comparison of Word and OpenOffice Writer mentioned in the blog entry you cited, can be horribly biased: that particular one is simply wrong on many counts, and reads more like a commercial for OpenOffice than a balanced report written by someone genuinely familiar with both products under comparison. Similarly, the mainstream PC magazines tend to rave about new versions of MS Office regardless of how good, bad or indifferent they are, and have done for years. caveat lector.

Re:Office 2007 is Irritating right now...

[DavidD_CA]

If the migration to Office 2007 breaks your macros, then who authorized the purchase of Office 2007 without thinking through the consequences?

If you say that "office 2007 just came with new machines" then the fault is in whoever purchased those machines. A company with an IT department should know to purchase machines without Office and instead use your Open License with Microsoft so that everyone is on the same version.

But don't blame Microsoft for this.

Re:Office 2007 is Irritating right now...

[Madcapjack]

I have students submit their programming assignments to me in Word 2007 format. Unfortunately, since I cannot read them and they don't follow my instructions to submit their assignments as plain old text, they do not receive credit. Too bad, so sad. either txt rtf or pdf. kiss

yo

Re:Office 2007 is Irritating right now...

[budgenator]

Apparently he's teaching them how to follow instructions, employees that can follow instructions and still be creative are quite rare and valuable today

Re:How about 'neither'?

[Tribbin]

RTF is MS format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rtf

Doc Formats?

[mr_stinky_britches]

Okay, I know the popular stance on this site will be "Why aren't they using x open source open standard format! Why aren't they using some latex!?!!?"

Firstly, I am a CS major and have a number of linux machines ..and TBH I am not even sure how latex works...how can you expect writers to know about this format which is primarily (as far as I can tell) used in *nix?

If it were me, I'd just demand PDF and be done with. So much wasted energy in this.

Re:Doc Formats?

[Tribbin]

Did you ever receive PDF's with diagrams and images and had to merge them together and edit them?

PDF would worse.

Re:Doc Formats?

[bh_doc]

Knowledge of TeX/LaTeX is pretty much a prerequisite in the Maths and Physical Sciences. I'm not so surprised that a CS major missed out. No disrespect, one of my majors was CS, too. It depends on what you typically write, but once you learn LaTeX you might find it hugley more sensible than any WYSIWYG system. I did.

Re:Doc Formats?

[coaxial]

LaTeX generates both Postscript and PDF. I don't know anyone who would submit or accept raw LaTeX source. All the journals I've looked at took either .doc or PDF, with the expressed requirement that it be "a single, self-contained file." You don't get that with LaTeX. Unless you're a masochist, all your references are in BibTeX, and all your graphs are in either PDF or EPS format, not that weird line-draw TeX command thing.

Re:Doc Formats?

[fredrikj]

Firstly, I am a CS major and have a number of linux machines ..and TBH I am not even sure how latex works...how can you expect writers to know about this format which is primarily (as far as I can tell) used in *nix?

TeX is pretty much standard in physics and math. I'm a physics student and TeX was the second thing we were taught in the computer introduction course -- after learning how to log in and do basic file management in Linux. It's just a matter of learning it.

It's actually a bit strange that TeX isn't more widely used in CS. CS people, if any, should be able to understand the benefits.

TeX works just fine in Windows, by the way.

Re:Doc Formats?

[Beetle B.]

Why has this discussion suddenly become one of MS Office vs TeX?

What happened to Open Office?

FWIW, the journals I publish to accept Word, PDF or TeX. Satisfies all crowds. If you don't want to do TeX, and don't want to pay for Word, use Open Office and export as PDF. No one is saying that they should require TeX and nothing else.

Re:Doc Formats?

[e**(i pi)-1]

>I don't know anyone who would submit or accept raw LaTeX source.
Most mathematics papers are now written in latex and the submission often by latex source.

Re:Doc Formats?

[ameoba]

In a normal CS curriculum, you probably won't need to use TeX at all as an undergrad. On the outside, you might have one math/theory course where the prof thinks it's worth knowing. If you continue on to graduate studies, OTOH, the use of TeX increases significantly.

Re:Doc Formats?

[ceoyoyo]

All the journals I've ever submitted to require you to split your figures out into separate PDF or TIFF files. They grab the text out of the main PDF and then can put the figures anywhere they fit.

Re:Doc Formats?

[R.Mo_Robert]

I'm a CS major, too, and I suggest that you learn LaTeX. Just start using it for small things at first to get the hang of it. That's what I did (glad I did, too, since that semester I was taking a linguistics class and it eventually came in handy for typing characters in the IPA!), and now I type almost all of my papers in it for any class, even though I have NeoOffice/OpenOffice on all my computers. (In fact, I really haven't had to use it yet in computer science, although it was nice for typing up study guides for my discrete math class. It's just so nice for all of my classes.)

Obviously it's known for typesetting math and such well, but it's great for pretty much anything I need it for. And it's free, and lucky me, my schools have it on all the lab computers. It's not just for Linux. On Windows, I'd recommend proTeXt for getting youself set up with all you need (I am a fan of the editor it comes with, TeXnic Center), and on the Mac I recommend MacTeX (although TeXShop, the editor it installs, could be a bit better--but it is still good).

Don't be afraid, just read a tutorial or two ... and remember that Google is your friend as you are learning. :)

Re:Doc Formats?

[poopdeville]

TeX's a weird thing. On the one hand, it's a very flexible way to format text. On the other, for most purposes, if you're using it correctly, it's inflexible to the point of transparency.

I had a friend who was writing her economics thesis. She wasn't happy with how it looked. So I suggested TeX. She wasn't interested until I showed her how my thesis turned out. (I was a mathematics major). I told her we could make her thesis look like mine in 20 minutes.

So I gave her a 20 minute introduction to LaTeX. Only the basics -- \documentclass[]{}, \begin{document} - \end{document}, \author{}, \title{}, \maketitle, \chapter{}, \section{}, \footnote{}, and a little bit about references. We copy pasted her thesis into a .tex file and I showed her how to use these commands as they were necessary in the text.

20 minutes later, she was a TeX convert. Two things really convinced her of TeX's power. The table of contents automatically changing to reflect document changes -- she saw how that, and mechanisms like that, would make her life much easier later. Also, the ease of changing formatting globally by changing the document class. And her thesis looked pretty, like a well done book. She said "Wow" a lot during this intro. Inflexible to the point of transparency.

I gave her a warning though. "If you let yourself, you'll start playing around with document classes, and end up wasting hours admiring your thesis." Extremely flexible.

Re:Doc Formats?

[c_sd_m]

Purely by source for the initial submission? That would be nice on the email quota. From my little corner of the world it seems like they want PDF or similar to send out to the reviewers and they'll take your LaTeX source later when/if it's accepted and you've made the changes.

Re:Doc Formats?

[colinrichardday]

And how are *nix users supposed to generate PDFs? The only way I know is to use pdflatex.

Re:Doc Formats?

[belmolis]

You can generate pdf from Tex output by using dvips followed by ps2pdf and from groff output by using ps2pdf. OpenOffice.org Writer can export pdf directly.

Re:Doc Formats?

[colinrichardday]

One could also use dvipdf, but except for using Open Office, they require TeX/LaTeX.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[twitter]

some people do not care about formats, they simply use the computer as a tool to create work. If the computer their superiors give them has Word 2007 on it, then that is what they use.

Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.

Re:How about 'neither'?

[nurb432]

Yes, they support RTF, but i didnt think they *created* it.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[bh_doc]

A thousand times yes. Using TeX is standard practice for physics and math papers. Why is it that Nature (not sure about Science) does not accept TeX documents? DOC? Why?

It's probably the fault of the biologists. Silly biologists.

But besides, Nature (again, not sure about Science) takes DOC files that have to be formatted in a certain way that is quite different to what ends up in the journal. They accept PDF like that, too, which is interesting.

Is the public FINALLY pushing back?

[erroneus]

For years and years, I fell into the fold where if Microsoft came out with something new, I upgraded. Latest and greatest was always the best. Then when XP came out, I somehow didn't find myself rushing to upgrade. The computer I was using at the time would barely run the OS and the newer Office software didn't mean anything to me except for occasions when someone would send me a document I couldn't read. (Though at some time close to that I was also trying out OpenOffice...guess what I was using to open those documents! Also around that time, I was starting to use Linu for more than a router and network server) I guess around that time I started questioning the wisdom of blindly upgrading.

Now at my office, shortly after Vista came out, people started asking me when we would upgrade. My answer was simply that I could see no business case at this time for doing so. Some people were actually happy to hear me say it... others were just like "okay..." My stance on Office is the same except I may have some issues if one of the primary office apps (that is build on office) is updated to require the newer office suite. I'll be unhappy but I won't have any choice... :(

But to hear these cases where people are pushing back against the upgrades? I'm very very happy to hear it.

virtually nothing for our effort

[nurb432]

Thats the real key.

And just wait until you start getting 'protected documents' or emails.

Too hard to install the compatibility pack?

[pcsmith811]

There is a compatibility pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. Maybe they should research that!

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA10168 6761033.aspx

Re:Too hard to install the compatibility pack?

[NilesDonegan]

Yeah, it's too hard. It's too hard if the converter doesn't exist! When I have a lab mate send me a Powerpoint 2007 .pptx file and I have to wait six months to open it on my Mac because Microsoft hasn't put out a converter for Microsoft Office 2004 for OSX and it's unusable data until then...

IT'S TOO HARD!

Re:Too hard to install the compatibility pack?

[bhtooefr]

RTFA.

That compatibility pack allows for opening Office 2007 documents in older versions of Office (NOT, say, publishing apps that import files from older versions of Office.)

And, TFA said that it wasn't due to the Office 2007 file format itself, anyway, it was due to the new Equation Editor in Office 2007 - save a file as Word 97-2003 format, and equations get turned into images, instead of equations (which is a specific OLE embedded object) like in Office 97-2003.

Re:Too hard to install the compatibility pack?

[guruevi]

And you obviously haven't used that compatibility pack with advanced documents. The compatibility pack is just a patch to fix what is now somewhat and force people to upgrade if there is a problem. I used it, it doesn't work all that great.

I also have some documents in the 'old' format and it looks 3 times different on Mac with Office 2004, Windows with Office 2003 and Windows with Office 2007 so I don't understand why anyone would even bother using Microsoft formats for publishing stuff. Use TeX, PDF or PS.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dal20402]

I'm not in a scientific field, but I am on the staff of a scholarly journal.

In my field, people don't even think about format. If you say "submit a paper," it's just assumed it will be in Word format. What's more, many scholarly papers are sufficiently complex that incompatibilities arise if you try to use OpenOffice or a variant to create those Word documents. If you are submitting a final product for something like a class, you can get around this by providing a PDF, but as journal articles face a lengthy editing process an editable format is required for submissions to journals.

If you asked our scholars for ODF, TeX, or anything else other than Word, they wouldn't even understand what you meant. If you are going to write something, you write it in Word, and hit "Save," and that's how things are written. You'd be amazed how many people ask me how I generate those weird PDFs... even though, if you have Adobe Reader installed, there is a PDF button in your Word toolbar. (And the people using Macs have a "PDF" button in the Print dialog box.)

I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.) I'd use something else if it were remotely possible. But it's just... not, at least in my field.

Stay off the MS Treadmill

[DumbSwede]

I use to have a machine that BSOD on upgrade to service pack 2. Office 2007 won't install on pre SP2. From another machine I used Word 2007 to send out resumes to several prospective employers only to have them request 1997-2003 format because they couldn't read my Word documents. I do government work now and where I work they have standardized on Windows 2000 with the Office 2003. I doubt Office 2007 would work on their machines and for reasons of security and stability and having gotten so many machines all working together smoothly they won't be upgrading to XP anytime soon. Maybe Windows 2000 is inferior to XP in most aspects, but big organizations HATE reworking everything to get it to work again when they have work to get done TODAY.

You can save 1997-2003 format from 2007, but it doesn't do it by default.
When I upgraded my Wife's machine to IE7 it broke all her access to bank accounts, which ironically would inform her she needed to "upgrade" to IE6.

This is just the kind of crap that will cause OS to win eventually (even if it is still years off). BTW, we use a mix of Windows and Linux and we UPGRADE the Linux all the time -- no big deal.

Re:Stay off the MS Treadmill

[BlurredOne]

IE7 'broke' online banking because SSL 2.9 and TLS 1.0 are disabled by default. Go into Internet Options --> Advanced, scroll to the bottom, and put a check in the 2 boxes. Problem solved.

Re:Stay off the MS Treadmill

[rwhealey]

You can save 1997-2003 format from 2007, but it doesn't do it by default. My school set Word 2007 to save in 1997-2003 by default. It's probably in some obsecure setting, though.

Re:Stay off the MS Treadmill

[KarmaMB84]

SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 appear to be on by default in IE7. SSLv2 is disabled due to the insecurity of the protocol. IIRC Mozilla is also working on disabling SSLv2 (in fact, I don't even see an SSLv2 option in Firefox 2.0.0.4 [Win32]).

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[cooldev]

Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.
-
Friends don't help friends install MS junk.

Well, it's good to see that you're open minded...

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Beetle B.]

You failed to explain why the default thing to accept is a Word document and not an Open Office one. I don't know your field, but I am an academic, and have never met a faculty member who was simply so incompetent that he could use Word but not Open Office. If a journal demands something in Open Office and puts up relevant links on how to get it, very few will complain. So why should the default behavior be to accept something that costs the users money, and not accept something that won't?

Regarding generating PDF's, I'm not sure what you mean. We have the free Adobe Reader on our office computers. And Word does not have an option to save as PDF. For that, we have to pay Adobe.

Re:How about 'neither'?

[Tribbin]

Since you didn't follow the link I put in my little post; let me spell it out for you.

wikipedia.org:
"The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated to RTF) is a proprietary document file format developed by Microsoft in 1987 for cross-platform document interchange."

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[Black Parrot]

Why? Because some people do not care about formats Journals, OTOH, like all their articles to look the same.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[Black Parrot]

I'm not in a scientific field, but I am on the staff of a scholarly journal.

If you asked our scholars for ODF, TeX, or anything else other than Word, they wouldn't even understand what you meant. I'm guessing that your journal isn't in the field of science or mathematics.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ceoyoyo]

PDF. I've never submitted a paper in anything else. I didn't actually realize that big journals would take DOC either.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dal20402]

I'm in law. Feel free to make your own joke here.

Many of our scholars, while they generate terrific scholarly work, are just not computer-competent. I absolutely cannot imagine getting them to successfully install OpenOffice, or their IT departments (which are frequently not much better) to support it. (These are folks who call for support to ask things like "How do I make a table?") If you required ODF, you would lose some submissions from those who actually read the requirement, and get 99% of your others in .doc format (as I said, people don't even think about format -- if they are writing something, they just open Word, hit "Save," and send it.)

Every school I know about buys a site license for MS Office, and either extends that to students (at considerable expense) or *requires* students to purchase MS Office along with their computers. Honestly, the assumption of Word is so ingrained, trying to challenge it in the legal academic field would be emptying the ocean with a bucket.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[JanneM]

For quite a lot of journals the submission format really doesn't matter as long as they can get the text and the images (which you often need to submit separately for final submission). The formatting you did is just used for reviewing (and as such only needs to be an approximation of the final format); the final submission is set from the raw text and images no matter what the original format was.

Conferences (and newer, smaller journals) tend to be different in that they really do use the author-submitted formatting, as a base or directly, as-is. Then exact formatting becomes an issue. Of course, look in any conference proceeding and you'll be astonished at the breadth of typographical design that still formally conforms to the same formatting instructions. It's often trivial to pick up the LaTeX-submitted papers (very strictly correct, but with a somewhat formal, old appearance) from early Word versions (thick-set fonts, spacing is all over the place, flush right never really is) and newer Word (OK; pretty neutral appearance though still with strange spacing variability between different elements).

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[Frosty Piss]

I'm guessing that your journal isn't in the field of science or mathematics.

People in math and many other sciences are not automatically computer savvy. For many people in science, the PC is more or less just for writing papers. Word has the wides acceptability because everyone has it. Many scientists don't care about the politics surrounding Microsoft, they are not computer scientists, and they have other things to care about. I know, shocking, but true.

We've had our own problems

[gerf]

[p]Macros that have worked even back in Office97 are now broken. A contractor at work tried to go buy Office at any Brick n' Mortar place, and since 2007 is the only one available, he's pretty much screwed... [p]I wish OOo had really good macro compatibility. If it does, let me know (email shown)

Re:We've had our own problems

[bhtooefr]

FWIW, you can still buy Office 2003 from places like Newegg...

Re:We've had our own problems

[mgiuca]

I don't think it does, but at least switching to OOo means this won't happen again in the future, while switching to Office 07 means you're just taking another step on the MS treadmill.

Re:We've had our own problems

[Trelane]

I wish OOo had really good macro compatibility. If it does, let me know

Compatibility with MSOffice is coming. It has very good macro capability besides that.

Re:We've had our own problems

[gerf]

Ouch, I just realized my poor formatting.

Anyway, we have so many specific macros that, while not overly complicated, would take entirely way too long to rewrite. And, they perform such specific functions with specific software that it'd be almost insane to rewrite everything, as it'd only help our company, and pretty much no one else, as we don't even sell them or distribute them.

Re:We've had our own problems

[Trelane]

Well, I know that it has some level of compatibility, because it's prompted me when I've loaded some documents in OO.o in the company I'm interning at. That said, there was an initiative to add VBA support to OOo that was announced by Novell/Sun a little while after the Novell/MS thing. That may have just been to add a fully-equal VBA language in addition to the Java, StarBASIC and python languages that are supported.

Re:We've had our own problems

[jimicus]

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the few reasons to go out and license your entire office using volume licenses for Windows.

Even though you may only have desktops which were supplied with XP, you'll have trouble getting hold of more desktops running XP by the end of the year so you must either support both or go for the volume license which lets you downgrade how you like.

Re:We've had our own problems

[INowRegretThesePosts]

I heard there was some VBA compatibility in OpenOffice. Perhaps it was StarOffice from SUN, or Novell's edition of OpenOffice. I recommend you to research this, and/or contact Sun and/or Novell.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using Word 2007, go here for the free "Save as PDF/XPS add-on" that Microsoft originally included in Office until Adobe sued them so ya haveta go get it yourself.

-AC

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[larry bagina]

Science and Nature don't cater to people that spend all day writing emacs macros to prove their lambda calculus theorems, it's for people that wear labcoats and do chemical/biological research. I have a Master's degree in a cellular biology. I've worked with a lot of PhD candidates and tenured professors. Dozens of papers were published yearly. The secretary was more computer literate than most of them.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[Black Parrot]

I'm guessing that your journal isn't in the field of science or mathematics. People in math and many other sciences are not automatically computer savvy. That wasn't my point. It's just that LaTeX is the de facto standard for generating professional publications in most of the sciences, mathematics, and CS. So when he says his journal's authors wouldn't know WTF tex is, I can draw the conclusion with reasonable confidence that his journal isn't in one of those fields.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ajanp]

Regardless of the reasoning behind it, it should be clarified what file formats are and aren't allowed currently at Nature and Science since it seems like there is a lot of conflicting information.

Nature: http://npg.nature.com/nature/submit/finalsubmissio n/SI/index.html
# MS Word document (.doc) (preferred)
# Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
# Plain ASCII text (.txt)
# Rich Text Format (.rtf)
# WordPerfect document (.wpd)
# PostScript (.ps)
# Encapsulated postcript (.eps)
# HTML document (.htm)
# MS Excel spreadsheet (.xls)
# GIF image (.gif)
# JPEG image (.jpg)
# TIFF image (.tif)
# MS PowerPoint slide (.ppt)
# QuickTime movie (.mov) (preferred)
# Flash movie (.swf)
# Audio file (.wav)
# MPEG/MPG animation (.mpg)

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/prep_ init.dtl
* .pdf (Adobe Portable Document Format)
* .ps (PostScript)
* .eps (Encapsulated PostScript)
* .prn (Printer file for a PostScript printer)
* .doc (Microsoft Word, version 6.0 and higher) -- note that we cannot accept files in Word 2007 (.docx) format, as explained here.
* .wpd (WordPerfect, version 7.0 and higher)

Science also specifically makes a point to mention:

Please do not send TeX or LaTeX files for your initial submission. Convert the files to PostScript or PDF instead.

Although we do not accept TeX and LaTeX source for initial manuscript submission, these formats are acceptable for manuscripts that have been revised after peer review. So as you can see,

Also, FTA, the reason that Word 2007 isn't being accepted is:

Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML.

So use Lyx

[shis-ka-bob]

Lyx allows you to write TeX without having to learn all the funny commands. It's just like how you can use KOffice to write ODF documents or MS Office 2007 to write OOXML documents ;-) There are other LaTeX front ends that allow you to generate documents without having to learn all the tags, but I like Lyx and its free.

Re:So use Lyx

[zippthorne]

LyX also has the best equation editor I've seen. It's not as pretty as the *Offices' equation editors, but you can enter equations in without taking your hands off the keyboard, and even insert TeX markup that it doesn't understand without messing anything up.

But most importantly: the equations are treated like part of the text, so there's no clicking madly around the edges of invisible boxes that occasionally disappear to the end of the page just to edit something.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[MrCrassic]

While that might be true, I personally would be willing to speculate that many people in those fields would have at least had some formal training on how to use TeX/LaTeX or some Equation Editing software, at least for the sake of completing a thesis.

One of my professors, who is a mathematician in academia, is not the most computer-savvy, but is using some distribution of Linux and knows how to write documents in TeX fairly well.

This kind of argument is much like English major students not knowing how to use a computer by default. It is somewhat discriminative.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[esme]

I wouldn't call her a push-over, but my wife is an experimental linguist who uses Word (and used Word for her diss). She uses a Mac, but generally upgrade to new versions as they come out to avoid problems reading docs from other people.

When she started working on her diss, I volunteered to learn LaTeX and BibTeX with her, to support her, bought a book on LaTeX, etc. But at the end of the day, she knew Word, and most of her colleagues and committee members used Word (especially the commenting and change-tracking features).

I've certainly known academics who used LaTeX, and even other stuff like roff. But most of the time, they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.

-Esme

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Tickletaint]

When did everyone in law stop using WordPerfect? Or was that only ever the standard outside of academia?

Re:Doc Formats? -- Counter-example

[beanyk]

I submit to some physics journals (Physical Review D, for example). They -prefer- LaTeX source with .eps figures. Though I use BibTeX with an external .bib database for references, I explicitly cut-and-paste the contents of the resulting .bbl file into the main paper draft.

I -think- they'll allow PDF or postscript submission of the whole thing, but it's slower to process, and they might add charges.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[barzok]

And Word does not have an option to save as PDF. For that, we have to pay Adobe

Yeah, because there aren't any free PDF print drivers out there.

Garbage.

[sulfur_lad]

I'm not even reading this. This is pointless. 90% of the journals I've ever submitted to have been PDF or bust. What a bollocks statement. Of course they're rejecting the Office 2007 format, they rejected every single other format before that too! "PDF, please." Now, rejecting PDFs that were created in Office 2007, that would be funny.

Go ahead, flame me, but this is ridiculous and not even news. Guess what? ODF will be rejected too and they'll say "GAH! PDF!!" On the other side of the composition fence, while powerful for its features, TeX-based stuff has lost out to the much more powerful WYSIWYG editors now available out there (includes both free and pay-office varieties). It is still great though, for whoever is still a TeX junky (and I get the picture that once you are one you always are).

Re:Garbage.

[mgiuca]

I'm all in support of using PDF to send and publish documents. But I don't see why a journal would want to accept a presentation format, when their job is to take your text and edit it heavily and publish it into their own workflow/styles/pages/etc. PDF is not a good format for editing (as you can witness if you use tools to convert PDF to txt or html - PDF is very much concerned with how text lays out on the page, so it loses proper paragraph and other "semantic" information).

Re:Garbage.

[Awel]

The reviewers want PDF. If your paper gets accepted and is to be published, then the production office will want an editable file. Sometimes all the authors send us is the PDF, and there's barely anything at all we can do with that - we just have to go back to the author and ask for something else.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dal20402]

I don't know about everyone in the legal field by a long shot. But, in the environments I'm familiar with, support gradually dwindled once WP shifted from DOS to Windows, partly because Windows key bindings sometimes conflicted with age-old WP ones and people had to relearn stuff anyway, partly because WP for Windows always has had some stability issues, and partly because the makers of expensive macro packages often used in law firms started to focus on developing for Word.

Today (I would estimate since about 2000-2002), Word is basically universal. People expect documents in Word format; not everyone can even read a .wpd anymore. Even the DOJ, one of the last WordPerfect holdouts, simultaneously uses Word and often needs to send or file documents in Word format.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[scheme]

That wasn't my point. It's just that LaTeX is the de facto standard for generating professional publications in most of the sciences, mathematics, and CS. So when he says his journal's authors wouldn't know WTF tex is, I can draw the conclusion with reasonable confidence that his journal isn't in one of those fields.

That's only really the case for physics in the sciences. The chemists and biologists tend to use word or other things besides TeX/LaTeX.

My Secretary

[crimguy]

She got a new computer with Vista/Office 2007. Started doing my docs (I'm a lawyer) without paying attention to the save dialog. I then get a bunch of work with the docx extension. Put the kabash on that pretty fast. But . . . that is how MS will achieve ubiquity with their new format.

Re:My Secretary

[sid0]

Compatibility Pack

Re:My Secretary

[kanweg]

That will make HIS computer compatible, not the ones of his clients etc. His points remains perfectly valid. Not bad for a lawyer.

Bert

Re:My Secretary

[sid0]

You can also save in the .doc format. AND you can also set the doc format as default.

Re:My Secretary

[Jesus_666]

Which might be just what he did.

MS Office Compatibility Pack

[antdude]

For those with older Office (2000 to 2003), why not use the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats? I have not run into any 2007 files yet since I still use 2000, but at least I am ready if any appear.

Re:MS Office Compatibility Pack

[MickDownUnder]

In which case if you're an Office 2007 user you would save to PDF (which is supported out of the box in Office 2007).

Re:MS Office Compatibility Pack

[Ash-Fox]

In which case if you're an Office 2007 user you would save to PDF (which is supported out of the box in Office 2007).

It doesn't. You need to download a component from Microsoft to get PDF to export.

Additionally, it converts formulas into picture elements in the PDF.

RTFA, please

[shis-ka-bob]

The point is that they did try and it turns out that Word 2007 screws up the math, even if you save the results in Office 2003 formats. As it turns out, mathematics is the language of Science and Nature. So, while many of us can go thought life without ever writing a contour integral, most of us will never be published in Science or Nature either (the closest I got was Physical Review Letters). Unless you want to assure us that you can handle complex math expressions with you free patches, I would suggest that you have a bit more respect for the staff of Science and Nature. They are reacting to a observed problem. I'll bet you that they tried the free patches before they decided to warn scientists all over the world about submitting articles using Word 2007.

Obscure?

[sid0]

Word Options -> Save -> topmost option "Save files in this format".

Stop pulling such nuggets out of your ass.

Re:Obscure?

[jimicus]

Yeah, but if it's a school network it's probably set through GPO so it's not quite there.

But thanks for playing.

equivalent of wvWare for .docx?

[bcrowell]

There's a convenient OSS library called wvWare that can convert .doc to various other formats, including xml, html, and plain text. You can run it from the command line, or from scripts. Is there any similar OSS software that runs on Linux, and can, e.g., convert .docx to html or plain text? Please don't tell me I just have to write some XSLT transformations in Java or something :-), and no, I'm not suggesting that something like wvWare would be sufficient for most scientific journals.

Re:equivalent of wvWare for .docx?

[bbtom]

XSLT ain't scary! You could always ask over on xsl-list, I'm sure someone may have done some kind of docx->xml->fo->pdf kind of pipe. I did briefly look at the Office Open XML format specification but it was like 900 pages long, and I don't have a decade to write a stylesheet.

The answer is that for all non-trivial purposes, people ought to start using simple, well-specified markup languages and simple transformations. I'm really impressed by TEI, for instance. And if you are a GUI designer, please, please, please find a way of making the XML-based process pretty.

Automatic Conversion

[DavidD_CA]

The first time I opened a 2007 Word document on my machine (with only Office 2003), Word was smart enough to go "Hey, can I download the compatibility patch for you?"

I said yes, and in one click I was able to open the document up. I imagine the same holds true for the other Office apps, though I haven't tried it.

Re:Automatic Conversion

[bhtooefr]

Either you had some patch level that made Office 2003 know about the patch, but hadn't installed it, or the .docx files have a header that is treated as a Word 97-2003 header, and runs a macro to give you that prompt...

(Hey, it's been done before - note Win32 .EXEs with their "This program requires Windows 95 or newer" dialog on Win3.x, and all Windows .EXEs with their "This program requires Microsoft Windows" or "This program cannot be run under MS-DOS mode" text when run on DOS.)

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[beyondkaoru]

computer literacy aside, i've noticed that a ton of math and science academics know how to use latex really nicely, even if they don't know much about computers. it makes sense if you're doing a lot of equations/formulas and they need to be legible.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Outside a cubicle, there is no such person. Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel. "Superior", that cracks me up. These people use Word only when their computer Inferiors demand it. You don't really want to know what they think of journals.

We're not being elitist, are we?

You owe me a nickel. I know several people with various scientific PhDs (mostly in Physics and Chemistry) who use Word on a regular basis. They know and use TeX, too, but that doesn't mean that they don't use Word when it's the best tool for the job.

And, by the way, none of them would ever think of the people they work with as "computer Inferiors" because they don't want to screw with TeX files.

You know what? I'd rather that people not send me either. Don't send me ODF, don't send me DOC. Send me a damn PDF.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[harlows_monkeys]

It makes a lot more sense to use something like TeX[...]

Well, Science does accept LaTex, according to the submission guidelines. And they then run it through a DOS program that converts LaTeX to Word.

Office is not the biggest issue.

[MaWeiTao]

I find this report a bit disingenuous because the implication is that this is unique Microsoft and Office. Not that I'm defending this at all, because it's extremely frustrating but I would say compatibility would be a much larger issue with Adobe and Quark software.

Given the industry they're in I tend to think compatibility with page layout applications is more important than compatibility with Office. I can only imagine the problems they'll encounter in upgrading to Adobe Creative Suite 3, assuming they do so at all. If other publications I've dealt with are any indication I wouldn't be surprised if they're still using Quark 3 and InDesign 1.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[Frosty Piss]

Odd. I asked my dad about that once. He was an oceanography professor for 30 years at a well known school on the West Coast. He's published a few papers... Said he used WordPerfect until switching to Word. But he's probably the exception.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Tickletaint]

As recently as last year, I had to help some of my friends set up their Macs to read WordPerfect files when they began internships at firms here in NYC. This year, as far as I know, everyone's using Word. Maybe it just took longer for the "real world" to adjust.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[Myself337]

I Just hate what they did with the menu's i had just gotten used to the old style!

IMO they should just upgrade and start accepting

[melted]

IMO they should just upgrade and start accepting the new format, for one simple reason. Office 2007 features a HUGELY improved "equation editor". Believe it or not, for most things you can come close to what you can do in TeX. This was a huge downside of Office before 2007.

Re:about my sig

[The Bungi]

None of this really matters because M$ is failing. Vista is a flop. No one wants it.

Why yes, just yesterday you were telling us how everyone is going broke because of "M$". You never did get back to dedazo on that one, did you? I wonder why not.

To the OP, all you need to do is look in twitter's posting history. Right now there's a jewel there where he explains how "Windoze is teh shit". Powerful stuff. There's lots of reference material out there. My personal favorite is this one, by far. Captures his je ne sais quoi very well.

I am glad someone brought this up

[semiotec]

although it'd be nice if Slashdot editors can be bothered to spell his name correctly. Many posts so far express some surprise that journals even accept anything other than Latex. Having been through the system several times, I can say that the reason that big journals like Science and Nature accept MS docs as the default format is because of biologists. Essentially, Latex is used only in Mathematics and Physics related sciences. Unlike them, most biologists don't know much about computers, and couldn't really give a rat's arse about the formats. Having trained in Physics (Bachelor) and Med/Bio (PhD) and now working in bioinformatics, I have had many arguments with people about this particular issue. My argument being that, the fact that the scientific process is an open process should also mean that the format in which the data are preserved should also be open, and not locked in some proprietary format like MS Doc and, yes, shock-and-horror, Powerpoint files. I've bitched many times to my old boss that he was spending a few thousand dollars on getting Photoshop licenses just to crop some pictures or change the levels. Although the lack of proper CYMK support in GIMP is a bit of a setback, but even then, just a couple licenses would have been sufficient for that purpose, rather than getting a license for every machine. I mean, these guys were using Photoshop as an image _viewer_! The situation in Physics is quite diffferent. Of course there are many hardcore OSS users, but many people just used BSD/Linux/(and even some old Unix machines are still chugging along), simply because they are free and they are sometimes also the best tools for the job. I remember in a few years ago working with an Astrophysics group during a summer vacation, and we had some time on the Parkes telescope, and we were able to remotely control the telescope from Sydney, which would have been impossible under MS Windows (at the time). Back to the point, ODF would hopefully bridge this difference, since if the biological scientists want to learn Latex, a WYSIWYG editor using ODF (such as OpenOffice.org) should be acceptable to them.

Re:I am glad someone brought this up

[semiotec]

serves me right for not checking things before submitting...

[in plain old text]

although it'd be nice if Slashdot editors can be bothered to spell his name correctly.

Many posts so far express some surprise that journals even accept anything other than Latex. Having been through the system several times, I can say that the reason that big journals like Science and Nature accept MS docs as the default format is because of biologists.

Essentially, Latex is used only in Mathematics and Physics related sciences. Unlike them, most biologists don't know much about computers, and couldn't really give a rat's arse about the formats.

Having trained in Physics (Bachelor) and Med/Bio (PhD) and now working in bioinformatics, I have had many arguments with people about this particular issue. My argument being that, the fact that the scientific process is an open process should also mean that the format in which the data are preserved should also be open, and not locked in some proprietary format like MS Doc and, yes, shock-and-horror, Powerpoint files. I've bitched many times to my old boss that he was spending a few thousand dollars on getting Photoshop licenses just to crop some pictures or change the levels. Although the lack of proper CYMK support in GIMP is a bit of a setback, but even then, just a couple licenses would have been sufficient for that purpose, rather than getting a license for every machine. I mean, these guys were using Photoshop as an image _viewer_!

The situation in Physics is quite diffferent. Of course there are many hardcore OSS users, but many people just used BSD/Linux/(and even some old Unix machines are still chugging along), simply because they are free and they are sometimes also the best tools for the job.

I remember in a few years ago working with an Astrophysics group during a summer vacation, and we had some time on the Parkes telescope, and we were able to remotely control the telescope from Sydney, which would have been impossible under MS Windows (at the time).

Back to the point, ODF would hopefully bridge this difference, since if the biological scientists don't want to learn Latex, a WYSIWYG editor using ODF (such as OpenOffice.org) should be acceptable to them.

Re:I am glad someone brought this up

[RDW]

"My argument being that, the fact that the scientific process is an open process should also mean that the format in which the data are preserved should also be open, and not locked in some proprietary format like MS Doc and, yes, shock-and-horror, Powerpoint files."

But generally they are _preserved_ in an open format, aren't they? PDF is universal for the final versions of biology papers (though occasionally MS-Office formats turn up in downloadable supplementary data - there's really no excuse for this). I don't think it matters at all which formats are used earlier in the submission process - whatever suits the scientist and the journal should be acceptable. The real issue with data access is that the results of research (especially publicly-funded research) should be freely available without journal subscriptions, which is unfortunately far from universal (and certainly not the policy of Science or Nature). Typically the authors sign away their copyright at the time of publication, and aren't even allowed to re-distribute the final version of their own manuscript without restrictions. I'd rather download a Word document from the author's website than pay $50 for an 'open' PDF from a journal my library doesn't subscribe to!

Re:I am glad someone brought this up

[semiotec]

not just preserved in publications, but for internal use also.

Can you imagine that ten years later, you want to look at some old data and find that the data files can longer be read properly?

A 20 yo .txt or .tex file has no problem being read today... although latex is not really good format for data entry.

PhD

[The Bungi]

Are you saying you have a PhD? Really? In what?

Re:PhD

[sayfawa]

I don't know about him, but I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I've never seen or heard of any physicist submitting a paper in Word.

Whenever I submit a paper to APS I'm surprised to see that they even accept submissions in Word, though they do state that they prefer Tex.

Re:PhD

[The Bungi]

Believe me, that depends entirely on what part of the world you happen to be at. Scientific research doesn't take place only in the US.

Re:PhD

[The Bungi]

Oh god, that thread just absolutely rocks. Too bad it's the sockpuppet though.

Re:PhD

[sayfawa]

Maybe it does depend on which part of the world you are in, but I haven't worked in the US for 9 years. So yes, I know research goes on outside the US, and no, I still haven't seen any physicists submitting papers as Word documents.

Re:PhD

[WilliamSChips]

Every single reference I've seen shows that outside of the US people avoid using Microsoft products even more.

How about Lyx?

[Cadallin]

There seem to be a lot of academics posting in threads on this item so I'd like to ask if anyone has any opinions on Lyx as a typesetter? Is it good enough for journal submissions?

And for those who don't know, Lyx is a GPL'd TEX front end that attempts to give a WYSIWYG-like front-end that produces TEX output. I'm just honestly interested to know if its good enough for professional use.

Re:How about Lyx?

[semiotec]

I've never used Lyx, but just went through their graphical tour (http://www.lyx.org/LGT/).

some gripes I have about Lyx:

1. working with the GUI elements is very slow, compared to just typing Latex source code. If you have a page of formulae, it's much faster to just type Latex then going through the graphical menus and selecting the symbols. Of course there are keyboard shortcuts and so on, but by the time you learn them and remember them, you could have just learnt Latex!

2. It doesn't seem to be a true WYSIWYG. You type in a window that resembles the common text editors, but the true output is still shown on a different window (xdvi). So, perhaps you can argue that this is a decent compromise, but I'd say it's no improvement at all. since it lacks the true benefits of editing documents as WYSIWYG and also lacks the ability to see the underlying code.

I wrote my entire PhD thesis in Latex, and while I am not totally fond of it, I consider it a better choice than MS Office.

Re:How about Lyx?

[tommy_teardrop]

Several people within my department use Lyx for a number of different processes. I use a Mac, so I work with TexShop. To be honest though, when it comes to submitting to journals, it's a moot point, as you are required to use the LaTeX code they provide with the macros they provide, so you have to work within the coded files anyway.

Most journals are fixed to a fairly limited number of formats: Geophysical Research Letters and Astrophysical Journal both use LaTeX, Icarus uses PDF or Word. I tend to write my papers in Word or TextEdit, simply because it's easy to add any code needed than remove it.

As a few people have already stated, Nature not accepting .docx files isn't really a surprise to anyone working in the field, as journals have their own work-flow processes which are painful to adapt, so they tend to stick with what works.

Different scientist.

[DrYak]

Using TeX is standard practice for physics and math papers.

The difference is that people writing in those papres, id est Physicist and Mathematicians, are very well versed in informatics. Most of them have at least some basic knowledge of Unices, and at least do program in Mathlab and a little bit in Fortran.

They can understand what TeX is, and given the quantity of formulae they have to work with, they understand the advantages that TeX has to offer regarding them.

Why is it that Nature (not sure about Science) does not accept TeX documents? DOC? Why? It's probably the fault of the biologists. Silly biologists.

Nature is much more about life science. In those field you can find scientist which are way much more dexterous in manipulating micropipettes than computers. Most of them see computers as things that just have to work. They fire it up and use the mail client (Outlook express. Thunderbird is you have luck), browse a little bit (Internet Explorer or Firefox depending on the university) to find papres that they won't read on screen anyway but print on paper, and write with a word processor (i.e.: Word). They only time they write with anything else is... when they fire up PowerPoint to prepare a poster (Yes. There are tons of people abusing Powerpoint to do posters instead of using a proper publishing tools).
The couple of them who feel enlightened and feel the urge to be different than the mass of sheeps, they buy Macs and install "Microsoft Office for Mac" on them.

Most of them don't realise that there other thing besides Word to handle text documents. And they all feel too much accustomed to Word to switch to anything else. They are the people who are upset when universities try to push for OpenOffice.org, because, they say, University should prepare their student to be proficient with tools that they will encounter later in professional life, and Word is what those student will find (as if being proficient with word processing in general was much different than learning Word down to the button position and being completely lost each time microsoft decides to change the layout for each new generation).

Want a worse example ? Medical doctors (I'm one). Some of the fellow doctors I've seen still do all their document formatting using space bar. There are highly considered specialists with a long list of publication that smash repeatedly on the space bar until things seem grossly aligned on screen. And then don't understand while the document doesn't come the same when they print it. Or open it in another version of Word.
Those are the mythical "80%" people that only use "20%" of the feature of an office suite. Not a different set of "20%" than anyone else. The basic "20%" that form the common ground of any office suite. The "20%" of features that Word shares with Notepad.
They have no concept of "styles" or flagging "titles" (they probably imagine an "index" is something you write tediously by hand. Usually they transmit that job to interns. Who go though the document painfully fixing the format so the "index" function works as intended).
And you want them to switch to TeX when submitting papers to Life-Science journal ? They will just faint at the idea of launching something that doesn't look exactly like what they are used to on screen, and will have a hard time to find out which is the new icon to click to save.

And don't let me start about the level of maths and statistics we learn in medical school (near to absolute zero). Most of us hire a statistician whenever some button on a calculator need to be pressed. There's no such thing as a need for a better formula-writing environment.

Thankfully the arrival of bioinformatics, medical informatics, medical imaging and such computer intensive speciality in the field of life science will bring a little bit more computer litteracy. (Thankfully for me that are fields that I'm studying too, so there's plenty of job opportuni

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dltaylor]

The legal profession used to one of the last holdouts for WordPerfect, because it allowed the decade-old files to be read in the latest version. How are you going to handle a 8- or 9-year-old deposition saved in Word 2005 format in 2013? Are you at least converting them to PDF?

Everyone who says that Word is an acceptable archive format for documents is a complete (fully trained) idiot.

I picked up a resume written in WP 4, on an Amiga, and imported it trivially (it did ask if I knew the format was WP 4) into WP 8 on X86 Linux.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[niiler]

Hmm... I just submitted a paper to "The Physics Teacher" in Word Format, and one to "Gait and Posture" (biomechanics) in PDF. Some of my colleagues in the math department where I currently work use LaTeX. I think that the format is largely dependent on the journal and not on the field. But that's just my 2 cents.

So what

[suv4x4]

I fail to grasp the meaning of this news. So the new xml based formats are distinctively different than the previous ones (different serialization), and since businesses aren't so quick to move to a brand new and untested piece of software, they reject it. Furthermore, their current press preparation products can't import the new format yet.

And?

You can be sure 2-3 years from now they'll be accepting Office 2007 documents just fine.

To those suggesting latex and pdf... please, have you ever worked in a magazine? While PDF and PostScript is usually how the final print is being exports, you don't just paste a PDF on the page that someone submitted and call it a day. There's extensive typesetting, adjusting of the whole material, addition of ads, checks for style consistency. What about Latex... this comes from the same people who said we should scratch all media players and Flash, and go for Ogg: in your dreams, Linux fans.

Word is a good format for submission since it's flexible enough and the content can be pasted in, say PageMaker or InDesign, and adjusted for print. All products support some level of import from DOC formats, and they don't support import from DOCX format.

ODF would be good too... if... there was support in said press preparation software. And there isn't any I know of.

So, while I like ODF and so on, don't just declare blindly the open formats the best thing just yet, since there are far more practical reasons commercial formats enjoy such popularity in the industry.

Re:So what

[jim_deane]

LaTeX is still used extensively in mathematics and physics journals.

The only physics journal I can think of that doesn't accept (and even prefer) LaTeX documents is The Physics Teacher, probably because many physics teachers aren't degreed physicists and wouldn't have any idea what LaTeX was.

Re:So what

[PDAllen]

To those who have never worked in a maths journal: you don't have ads, you don't paste a PDF, instead you ask for the source LaTeX, you don't need to use linux to get LaTeX (I don't, I use Wordpad and miktex) and most maths journals simply say: first submission, PDF or maybe PS, on acceptance send the LaTeX and the figures, if you can't do that we will charge you retyping fees for any other format. There is a reason for this, and it is that anything other than LaTeX makes more work for the editors.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[porcupine8]

Fine, take a look at my professor from my master's program - a woman who has a chaired professorship multiple multi-million dollar federal grants going at any one time. She had to have me copy and paste something for her once because she couldn't remember how to do it. She would freak if asked to use anything but Word, because she's barely learned that.

Or heck, a math professor my husband had in grad school, who used LaTeX because that's standard but used a WYSIWIG editor (and barely could use that) because the actual markup was far beyond him.

I could believe that being brilliant at computer science implies that you are on the cutting edge technologically and demand only the best for your computing. Being brilliant at math or biology or psychology implies no such thing.

(Though I will say, "superiors" is a bad choice of words. "IT Department," yes, but not superiors.)

Adobe did not sue Microsoft over PDF/Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe did not sue Microsoft about anything related to PDF creation in Office. Even the most irresponsible published articles on the subject only claimed that Adobe was threatening to -- and then, the ONLY source for that assertion was Microsoft themselves.

Think about it for a second. I'd bet it's ten times more likely that Microsoft was worried it could be sued by (just about anyone, Adobe, Nuance, whoever) if they included XPS generation in Microsoft Office, because then they'd be using their monopoly in an existing product to bootstrap the dominance of a new product (or in this case, format) -- the type of thing Monopolies get in trouble for. I'd bet their legal guys went like, er, we might get in trouble if we bundle XPS generation, we should unbundle it.

And then someone inside Microsoft went, well hey, that's going to be pretty stupid if we bundle PDF support but unbundle XPS support. That'd basically be a crib death for XPS. So let's hold PDF back too, and blame the whole thing on Adobe. Microsoft has been trying to claim that XPS is somehow more of an open standard than PDF anyhow, and spreading an uncorroborated rumor about Adobe being litigious about their format is totally harmonious with that strategy.

If this was just about Adobe and PDF, Microsoft would have unbundled PDF but left XPS support bundled in. No published report has explained how any possible Adobe "intellectual property" threat about PDF accounts for the unbundling of XPS generation.

The real truth is, Microsoft is holding back their PDF generation stuff because they can't afford to let it sit any higher on the totem pole than their support for their competing format.

I say bring on a Microsoft PDF READER. Apple has one. Adobe could use a kick in the butt to get competitive in the Reader department, and Foxit just ain't doing it.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[porcupine8]

Though I can see PDF just for the review copy, for the final version it would be a pain in the ass to format for the journal. You can copy/paste the text out of most PDFs (though I'm guessing you'd lose the formatting) but how would you get tables out, other than just recreating them?

Collaboration features

[twitter]

they use Word because the collaboration features are so much more robust, because that's what most people are familiar with, and all the journals accept it.

No, they use it because the journals demand it. I'm glad that's changing. Word is crazy, quirky and wastes the users time. It also forces you to use Windoze, which itself sucks life. You should know that from all the problems your wife has at times like this when there's no Mac version available.

For collaboration, subversion works great. If it has not already been worked into Open Office and others, it won't take much to do it. All of this is old hat for people who have been combining work from hundreds of people to make free software. The collaboration tools M$ introduced a couple of years ago are late and second rate as usual.

Re:Collaboration features

[dedazo]

It also forces you to use Windoze, which itself sucks life.

Yes, of course.

For collaboration, subversion works great. If it has not already been worked into Open Office and others

That sounds suspiciously like the "no Photoshop? no problem, use The GIMP!!" argument. I know any number of people in the publishing industry that would kill you if you tried to take away Word and its revision/collaboration features from them, not to mention SharePoint. Ever use Office 2003 with SharePoint twitter? Well, I guess it doesn't really matter. It's all "M$ shit" to you.

Subversion? Please. Are you also going to require they learn Perl as well? People just want to get their jobs done with the best tools available. In this case, that would be Microsoft Word, whether that causes your blood sugar to go off the scales or not.

Sometimes I really can't tell if you're being elitist or you're just permanently and completely blinded by your insane hatred of Microsoft. I bet even the most die-hard free advocate is capable of admitting there are niches and segments where free software simply has not reached an acceptable level of functionality. You are just "evangelizing" for the sake of it. And looking all the more ridiculous for it.

Re:Collaboration features

[zCyl]

I know any number of people in the publishing industry that would kill you if you tried to take away Word and its revision/collaboration features from them, not to mention SharePoint.

Yeah, well if we're talking about scientific journals (which the main article certainly was), then a buzzword-bingo solution-looking-for-a-problem like SharePoint is not relevant. What is relevant is the ability to do references easily, do equations easily (including references to those equations), have layout and font compatibility between computers and versions, and so forth. Word makes almost every single one of these quite painful, requiring an armada of add-ons just to accomplish the most basic work. And the .doc format itself contributes to these problems, particularly with unpredictability of the result when taking files from one computer to the next.

So no, it's not an issue of being elitist to find that Word and .doc severely get in our way. It's simply the fact that they do.

Re:Collaboration features

[dedazo]

As usual twitter has gone from making a point to just saying "M$ windoze is teh sux". My reply to him was to his "argument" that people who rely on Word's excellent revision control feature would just as happy with Subversion and OpenOffice, which is completely ridiculous.

I have no problem with people not using Word to create scientific papers. It's not suited for that. Right tool for the job and all that.

Re:Collaboration features

[porcupine8]

It also forces you to use Windoze, which itself sucks life.

I would like to point out that my department is all-Mac, and is very Word-heavy. When I turn in assignments in RTF format I get them back as commented Word files. Though some professors do use Keynote over Powerpoint.

Re:Collaboration features

[ldj]

Wow. Just, wow. Talk about kettles, black, and all that! You jump on someone else for suggesting there are better alternatives to the MS Office collaboration tools, calling the person a blinded evangelist. Then you turn around and use phrases like "Word's excellent revision control feature?!"

Try having a dozen or more co-authors edit a document simultaneously, merging the changes submitted by each along with a short description of why each change was made. Then repeat the process a couple dozen times, generating multiple versions of the document, retaining the ability to simply generate any version at any time.

MS Office's change tracking, SharePoint (TM), etc. may be fine for some things, and it may be improving. But to say that Word has an "excellent revision control feature" is a bit over the top. I would say it is adequate for many purposes, but comes nowhere near a true version control system's capabilities for true collaboration and version control.

Re:Collaboration features

[Haeleth]

Word is crazy, quirky and wastes the users time.

I heartily agree. It's a dreadful program. Nothing horrified me more than a colleague of mine who recently admitted that she actually likes it.
(I would only have been marginally more shocked if she'd claimed to like goatse.whateveritisthesedays.)

It also forces you to use Windoze, which itself sucks life.

This, however, is - thank God - not true.

Word 2000 (the most recent version to be even remotely tolerable) runs just as well in Wine, or Crossover if you want professional support. No Windows required.

Re:Collaboration features

[dedazo]

MS Office's change tracking, SharePoint (TM), etc. may be fine for some things, and it may be improving. But to say that Word has an "excellent revision control feature" is a bit over the top. I would say it is adequate for many purposes, but comes nowhere near a true version control system's capabilities for true collaboration and version control.

My comment was made in the context of simple collaboration as enabled by Word's revision control system, which dear old twitter claims can be easily and painlessly substituted by a non-existent OO.org/Subversion "solution". Classic mindless zealot drivel. Unlike him, I have used Word/SharePoint in a collaboration environment, I know how OO works because I've actually bothered to use it, and I fancy myself a Subversion/Collabnet expert of sorts since I use it extensively. twitter just thinks it's all "M$ shit" and does his authoritative dismissal based on that and that alone.

I never claimed Word's tracking feature can surpass an actual source control solution, mainly because it wasn't designed for that. But since I have actually used it any number of times in a manuscript revision cycle mode with 10-15 people involved and I know it works quite well, I feel I'm perfectly entitled to say it's excellent, at least within the constraints it was designed with. This is not about large-scale distributed revision control, which Subversion handles quite well. It's about simple collaboration.

So, please don't try to twist what I wrote, OK? When I lose my mind due to pathological hatred of a company and start blabbing on about how something is "shit" when I've obviously never used it, then you can give me your kettle-pot argument.

Re:Collaboration features

[ldj]

I know what you're *trying* to say. But once again, when you use phrases like "excellent revision control feature," that's a pretty big statement. Now you've qualified that to "excellent, at least within the constraints it was designed with," a statement which completely removes the backbone of your claim. After all, I can say almost anything can be construed to pass that test, depending on how I define the design constraints! :)

Sorry, I may just be having a little fun at your expense, since I realize you didn't mean to come across as a MS Office zealot. ;)

But I also stand by *my* claim that Office's collaboration tools have a ways to go before they can match the stability, accuracy, and capabilities of standard version control tools, which is the way our group maintains software documentation (design documents, user's guides, etc., several over 400 pages) with a dozen or so authors, tagging the documentation directly with the software tags. Oh, and all of this cost us $0 and no licensing hassles like we see other organizations constantly struggling with, which is a nice bonus. :)

Bottom line is, try not to make such strong statements when it's relatively easy for others to offer evidence to the contrary. I don't doubt that you're happy with the solution you have in place, and I realize you were just trying to slap down a "zealot." But that doesn't mean there aren't other equal or even better solutions out there from the perspective of others, which may be one interpretation of what the original poster was getting at. Our solution is a LaTeX/CVS solution -- not exactly the "non-existent OO.org/Subversion 'solution'" you attributed to the GP, but a close approximation which indeed was "easy" and "painless" for us. In fact, for our team (most of whom had zero prior LaTeX experience), the basic learning curve was less than a week and we no longer have to deal with the frequent Word formatting issues, etc. But that's another subject. :)

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[harvardian]

Your "reasonable confidence" is way off the mark, at least with respect to the scientific field I work in.

CS and math academia I have no knowledge of. I am, however, a graduate student in molecular biology at a top-5 American university. The principal investigators I work with have had many papers printed in Science and Nature collectively.

And they universally have no idea what LaTeX is. I do because I do computational work and I was a CS major as an undergraduate. They care about the results they get in R, or Excel, or the proprietary software that came with the AP Biosystems scanner. They could care less what they write those results up in. And since Word is the de facto standard, Word is what they use.

Re:about my sig

[networkBoy]

You are a touch, well..., out of touch.

People use what is provided to them. Especially outside of the technical areas (math, EE, CS, etc.) I think that the journals accept the DOC format because it is convenient to do so. I also am willing to bet they have a rendering parser that converts the .doc format to TeX.
-nB

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[encoderer]

Isn't Word 2007 in an XML format? It might not be the most standards-compliant XML, but it's a long way from binary, no?

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[644bd346996]

I'm in law./quote>

That explains it. Legal documents are ugly! Just take a look at the stuff posted on groklaw. How the hell did it become standard practice to create a vertical line out of a column of aligned parentheses? Can't these people at least use the pipe character?

TeX and Word.

[twitter]

It's actually quite easy, if you use it regularly.

It's not just easy, it's a huge time saver. Trying to making a long Word DOC act right is a death by a thousand clicks and it never really works well. Open Office is better, but it is still clicky, clicky and can auto-wrong things. If you just have to have buttons to press, use Kile.

Word Perfect was a reasonable editor for the purpose, but it was slain long ago.

Re:TeX and Word.

[Jesus_666]

Open Office is better, but it is still clicky, clicky and can auto-wrong things.

Ugh. Don't remind me. Whenever I use a freshly installed version of OOo I trip over the program insisting that "1/2" has to mean some kind of abstruse date (it's not even in the current year but rather in 1970). It does that until I dig up the setting regarding auto"correction" and turn it off. I like that behavior even less because slashes don't belong in dates in my locale. When you try to make your program act smart don't make the implementation stupid.

Note: I get bitten by this often because I use OOo to manage my P&P character sheets. I would switch sheet generation to LaTeX, but I prefer to have them live-editable.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There are several good alternatives to the new Office but no good reason to buy into it. There's Kword, Open Office, Abiword, Star Office and Word Perfect. With LyX, you can do GUI Tex if you want. If you are really stuck on Office, Open Office is a good fit. The only reason to move to the new Office is that you want M$ at any cost.

That simply isn't true. Right now, if you want a word processor with the most powerful features and the best usability, the winner — by quite some way — is Microsoft Word. Imagining that things like OpenOffice Writer or AbiWord are competition is simply wishful thinking by someone who, for whatever reason, regards Microsoft products as bad simply because they are made by Microsoft.

And no, I don't work for Microsoft. In fact, I even run OpenOffice on my home PC, because I don't believe in infringing copyright and I don't use office apps enough at home to justify paying for the Microsoft suite. But for professionals at work, I wouldn't dream of recommending Writer over Word. I could write (and have written) a detailed list of objective criticisms to support this position, but I doubt you'd have any interest in reading it since you already appear to have made up your mind. If you (or anyone else) really is interested, a quick Google search of my posting history here will turn up several relevant posts.

Journals

[looneyboy784]

Has anybody at Slashdot ever actually submitted anything to a journal? You are all advocating LaTeX but the truth is many journals will not accept anything other than a single column .doc file that they can copy and paste into their fancy typesetting software. A LaTeX file is useless to them as they use none of its typesetting features. I tried it once and got turned down because they wanted the .doc version pain in the ass but I learned my lesson.

Re:Journals

[lahvak]

Pretty much every math journal out there accepts LaTeX. Some of them actually require LaTeX. Lats year I had to help a colleague of mine from our computer science department convert a paper drom word to LaTeX, because he was submitting it into a math journal, and LaTeX was the only format they would accept.

Re:Journals

[Trelane]

and physics In fact, they have their own document classes....

Re:Journals

[ceoyoyo]

Yup, I have. IEEE provides Word and LaTeX templates and accepts PDF. So you can use either one you want and the result is the same. The more clinical journals I've submitted to provide Word templates and also require PDF.

Re:Journals

[NanoProf]

Depends on the journal- the mainline Americal Physical Society journals (Physical Review A,B,C,D,E,Letters) accepted LaTeX (made their own macros- RevTex) for years before accepting Word.

Re:Journals

[XenonChloride]

Has anybody at Slashdot ever actually submitted anything to a journal? Yes. ACS (American Chemical Society) journals (e.g. J. Phys. Chem.) and Elsevier journals (Tetrahedron, Tetrahedron Lett., J. Photochem. Photobiol., to name a few) DO accept LaTeX submissions!

Re:Journals

[BitterOak]

Math and physics journals pretty much all accept LaTeX and many require it, while most other fields don't seem to use LaTeX, including computer science. To answer the grandparent's question, yes I have submitted articles (and had them accepted for publication) using LaTeX. The journal was Physics Letters B, published by Elsevier, and they provide a document class for article submissions. They may accept DOC files now, but when I submitted, LaTeX was the only way to go.

Re:Journals

[marcosdumay]

The odds of a journal dealing with LaTeX depends on its area. While near all CS journals accept and lots require it, at humanities lots of journals can't even deal with it, and lots of academics never listened about LaTeX.

Re:Journals

[buga]

In my past life as a scientist, I actually submitted a few. The physics journals we submit to actually prefers LaTeX. But they usually want you to use a custom document class. The situation may be different in other fields.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[sillyphisher1]

You owe me $.15 for all 3 members of my MS (ecology) committee & another nickle for my PhD (agronomy) advisor. The rest of my committee isn't formed yet, but 1 potential member, a tenured professor with dozens of journal pubs and a book chapter, looked at me funny the other day when I complained about people who don't use styles in MS Word. Styles??? what's that? The Journals published by the American Society of Agronomy specifically forbid "typeset" formats such as .tex and require either word or word perfect. My advisor still prefers wordperfect, but deals with .doc as he needs to. I sent him an .odf recently and he refused to even consider yet another program. I'm tempted to offer to install lyx on his windows machine? We do need to have "track changes" type functionality(as well as table formatting) and Open Office is NOT compatible with Word at that level. Our department is just about falling apart over this .docx baloney... My IT person told me "you might not like it, but it is just the way things are going and you have to use it" regarding office 2007 on the windows machine I use occasionally. What to do?

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[martin-boundary]

I'm in law. Feel free to make your own joke here.

Oh great. Now the in-laws are adding their two cents worth too...

You asked for it :)

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dal20402]

It's an interesting question. The Office 2007 format represents the first big change to .doc since Word was broadly adopted in the legal profession, so no one has had to think about it yet.

My guess is that Word 97 .doc will be fully supported by Word until MS decides to change the format *again*, whenever that may be. So, if their past practice is any indication, we'll be fine through 2013, but not past it.

Of course, open-source translators will have all that time to improve their compatibility. They already work well enough to read an old document, if not always to print a version that you could immediately file or send to a client. In the end, I think it will be the same as many other usse of Microsoft products: gross and inelegant... but it will more or less work. Remember, there was no significant open-source support for the really early Word formats; now there is.

RTFA?

[twitter]

There is a compatibility pack for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. Maybe they should research that!

Oh, you mean that thing that sucks life that Rob describes in his "Interoperability by Design" article? What makes you think that will fix the equation editor problem with M$'s new formats?

It's always been this way with M$. You change versions, you lose work. Office 2007 is just a bigger problem not a different problem. It's good to see it being rejected.

Not a big deal

[nmapper]

Office 2007 user here. This is not a big deal, I have already set 2003 as my default "save as" to accommodate the slow change. I will also add that there are free conversion tools available. It's not as if we are etching the words into stone where they will remain that way forever lol...

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[dal20402]

Manual typewriters didn't have pipe characters. Practice, and court rules, are slow to change. Today, you will often see pipe or vertical-line characters.

The general format of filings, as utilitarian as it is, serves a critical purpose, though... all the elements are simply presented and always in the same place, which makes life much, much easier for paper-drowned, incredibly overworked judges and court personnel.

WriteNow 4.0 where are you ?

[speedlaw]

My XP box dies....can't do vista while in first draft. Go mac....so happy. Have to buy Word for Mac...sacrilege.

Re:Yawn squared

[billsoxs]

Where I work, we likewise aren't using Office 2007 format... because we aren't set up to use Office 2007.

It is just a thought BUT maybe they are using Macs - I run a Mac and the Mac version of Word excel, Power Point cannot read the new version of 2007 Office. There is no converter - yet. (Yes, I use Office - but it drives me nuts!) It seems to me that MS is going back to the bad old days of forcing upgrades by removing compatibilities.

Editors and scientists and computers - oh my!

[Anonymous Coward]

Editors like things to be uniform. Their job is to get things to print properly at the end of the day - both from a writing and from an "interface with the printers" standpoint - and that's where things can get dicey when using a writing program that the PRINTING industry views an non-standard, which many small press publishers view anything other than Word and .pfd as being.

No, I am not talking about the larger academic publishing houses, but smaller journals often do not have the money to USE the higher-priced academic printing firms and have to play with the smaller companies, simply because these journals have circulations which are quite small, relatively speaking. This happens to people writing their dissertations all the time, too, especially when they have to use serious scientific notation in math, genetics or other graphically-oriented scientific notational areas of research, or have to use lots of color-specific photographs.

Small, short-run print shops are often run by people who are NOT the most capable individuals on the planet when it comes to handling even simple graphic placement problems, let alone handling scientific notational alignment issues and trying to tweak a (to them) unusual text creation program to properly interact with their press equipment. Especially with regards to notational placement and statements that they simply have no clue as to where anything SHOULD go, of course...

Don't believe me?

Ask ANY small-run magazine editor about Printers. You will get an education in a new area of single-strand virology that masquerades as marginally tool-using anthropoids! But beware! The language that they use will be neither pleasant, nor fit for polite company. In some cases, drunken veteran members of the Merchant Marine Service have been known to tell these people to mind their language during such discussions - it can get THAT bad!

Just a word from the other side of the desk - the editorial side...

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

FWIW, I had this discussion with a lawyer friend a few years ago as Word was becoming dominant. At the time, he said most legal firms were still using WordPerfect for the simple reason that they had lots of boilerplate material in that format and weren't prepared to spend time and money converting and checking it all.

Equation editor

[Z34107]

What makes you think that will fix the equation editor problem with M$'s new formats?

They did "fix" the equation editor. The result is the new one that Office 2007 uses by default.

The original one was a third-party package Microsoft bought and put into Word, and could be somewhat daunting. The new one is simpler and built into the ribbon, but really only useful for one-line formulas.

Something everyone's missing, though: THE ORIGINAL EQUATION EDITOR IS STILL IN OFFICE 2007!. Put in your "Microsoft Equation" object the same way you always have - insert->object.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ozmanjusri]

I could write (and have written) a detailed list of objective criticisms to support this position

I'm interested. Can you post the list please.

University Assignments

[Dersaidin]

At my university a recent assignment used a submission system which required one of the files to be a .doc file.

Being an OpenOffice user, I found this annoying. Even more so when the tables in the document became very messy on export to .doc. It make much more sense for large achidemic organizations to use more global filetypes, such as OpenDocument formats or Portable Document Format.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[c_sd_m]

The lack of Tex/Latex on these lists also seems to be causing some confusion. I can't see why anyone would send an initial submission in Latex source. Any Latex document will be compiled to PostScript or PDF for distribution by the writer. Accepting PostScript or PDF is accepting Latex/Tex.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ImTheDarkcyde]

"The average user cattle doesn't care about the data format war,"

ahh, there's the techno-elitist attitude these comments have been missing!

And of course it's a "we're right you're wrong, we know what's best for the world" statement too!

And whot he hell is this Weir guy to reccomend anything?

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Comatose51]

My professor almost laughed at me once when I tried to plot some data using Excel. At least in CS, GnuPlot and LaTex are pretty popular.

Does "holistic philosphy of design"

[ClosedSource]

have anything to do with cracks in the G4 cube?

Re:Baby steps.

[ClosedSource]

Or better yet, just reject anything from an author that doesn't share their beliefs. It's not as if communication of ideas has as much to do with their business as enforcing a politically-correct philosophy.

Re:Smells like an argumentum ad verecundiam to me

[martin-boundary]

No, it's really a strawman argument. By invoking Stanford biologists (I only talked about economists and parapsychologists) he's asking me to either confirm an unrelated generalization, or to argue against my own position. Rather than take the rhetorical bait, I opted instead to reemphasise the hard/soft idea and let him (or anyone) make up his own mind to whom the definition applies to.

You are not correct on the choice of tools however. There is a strong correlation between disciplines and tools. Because *TeX is much better suited for technically intricate typesetting, it is the preferred tool in those sciences which have a substantial nonverbal component, such as mathematical equations, chemical formulas, abstract physics diagrams, etc. it just so happens that the need for precision in hard sciences is often a motivating factor for nonverbal symbology.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[tsa]

Find me a push over like that with a PhD in any scientific field and I'll give you a nickel.

I know a whole lot of beta-scientists who couldn't care less about computers. I even know some who love Word, and have written their Ph.D. thesis in it 'because it's the best tool for the job.'

I myself have written my thesis in WordPerfect since I didn't like the way Word crashed on me every 5 minutes (this was in 1998), and the way Word handles pictures and formulas. Had I known LaTeX better then I would have used that because although it's a bit harder to use than WordPerfect, it pruduces files that I most probably still can read and use after 10 years.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[InadequateCamel]

I must agree. I find the TeX-over-Word zealotry far far far more irritating than the my-OS-is-better-than-your-OS arguments. The idea that TeX is "obviously" easier to use is an insult to those of us who are (a) scientifically-minded, (b) technologically-minded, and (c) able to type and format a Word document in the blink of an eye.

Implementing TeX is cumbersome and irritating, and with rather little benefit given that many major journals have (wisely) chosen to go with the most popular format. If the popular format becomes unusable due to baffling corporate decisions then there will be a shift in default format, and that paradigm shift will be driven by the peer reviewers and editors, who in turn will be influenced by their students and peers. THAT is where you effect change, not by implying that everyone who uses "M$" products is a fucking moron.

Re:IMO they should just upgrade and start acceptin

[what about]

Why should they pay good money out of their pocket to please Microsoft ?

They are printing, not editing equations !

As usual, if you pay me for Word 2007 and all following forced Microsoft release then, thanks, I will use it.

If you are not going to, please stop advocating it without comparing it with other alternatives.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[IvyKing]

I hate Word with a passion, although I've never used Word 2007, because it thinks it's smarter than me. (As OpenOffice so slavishly tries to imitate Word I have some of the same problems with it.)

My biggest gripe about Star/OpenOffice is exactly that - it is too much like MS-Word (or more precisely, too much like MS-Word for Windows, the old Word for DOS had some rather nifty features). Both have a brain-dead approach to inserting graphics (though SO/OO seems to be a bit less so), where the graphics have to be resized after insertion (often leading to messing up the aspect ratio). A much better approach is to define a frame/container for the graphic and allow for the choice of proportional scaling to fit, non-proportional scaling to fit or cropping - that was a standard feature of Island Write back in the early 90's and apparently is in Apple's latest word processor.

Re: Why use Doc at all?

[TheEmptySet]

The grandparent comment should have claimed only that Tex is ubiquitous in the hard sciences. Though I know plenty of biologists who have come to see the benefits of Tex, they are not the norm. But then they do not need the same level of sophistication as theoretical physicists and mathematicians, so the main benefit of Tex is just that it makes things look more professional.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[PDAllen]

I don't really see any conflicts here. If you submit to a journal, you don't send them source LaTeX initially, because then you have to send 15 eps graphics separately as well and then they have to muck about compiling it. It's easier (for both of you) to send them the compiled PDF or PS, which they can open, see it looks like mathematics, and bounce to an appropriate referee in a few minutes. Then after the referee reads it, the journal can come back and tell you to send along the LaTeX and graphics for publishing.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[mspohr]

My wife tried to use Word for her dissertation (English) but found that the basic page and footnote formatting couldn't meet the specs and it kept shifting after opening and closing the file. I finally switched her to OpenOffice.org which worked a charm. We got precise stable formatting.

LaTeX RARE in MATH ?!

[Romwell]

=you don't talk to mathematicians often. There's nothing BUT LaTeX for math. Heck, buy a recent goof math book, it's likely to be typeset in LaTeX! Even CS people use it.

Re:LaTeX RARE in MATH ?!

[Anthem.uxp]

Funny that one had to point out that CS people use it. After all that one CS guy built it. (You know, that US guy)

Re:LaTeX RARE in MATH ?!

[Romwell]

Well, I just automatically considered him to be a mathematician )) After all, the distinction between ntheoretical computer science and mathematics is not that well-defined )

Re:LaTeX RARE in MATH ?!

[Otter]

LaTeX RARE in MATH ?!

Uh, no, I said it's the norm among mathematicians. It's rare in even the math-heavier parts of biology research.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[MickDownUnder]

Word 2007 allows you to save to PDF.

That's the thing

[melted]

For the first time ever it DOES get the math right. It's ironic that they insist on the version of Word that couldn't render good looking math to save its life.

You haven't tried Office 2007 equation editor

[melted]

If you did, you'd see that their insistence on using Word 2003 doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I'm a die hard TeX user, and I won't be switching to Word or anything else, but if I was using Word, I'd be using W2007 - anything else is torture.

The work around

[MickDownUnder]

David Carlisle has made changes to omml2mml.xsl stylesheet supplied by Microsoft to fix the issue.

http://bhandler.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!70F64BC91 0C9F7F3!2029.entry

http://dpcarlisle.blogspot.com/2007/04/xhtml-and-m athml-from-office-20007.html

Re:The work around

[bbtom]

That is mega-cool-awesemo! This means that I'll finally be able to take what few Word documents I have and convert them to well-formed, non-insane XHTML! If you want to make your eyes sore, take a look at the result of Word HTML export - it's *messy* as hell.

I find it somewhat ironic that the Microsoft Spaces link returns a parsing error - apparently, MS are trying to serve HTML 4.0 as application/xhtml+xml which completely borks in Firefox - it is also amusing since IE doesn't support application/xhtml+xml which means this page would probably not work in IE either, unless it ignored it and just opened it as tag soup. Microsoft's Next-Generation Blogging Environment: Doesn't Work In ANY Browser, for your convenience!

Justice Ministry of Finland switched to ODF

[Quietti]

In Finland, the Ministry of Justice recently switched to ODF. Other Finnish ministries and parapublic organizations are expected to follow soon.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Macthorpe]

I'm always amused by how it's so much easier for you to assume someone works for Microsoft than actually argue the point.

Re:Saving compatible versions

[Ash-Fox]

Some people don't really know what they are talking about though--while this article has legitimate concerns, it is very easy to save compatible documents. Save as and then choose 'Word 97-2003 compatible,' done. Stop complaining.

From the article:

Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML.

Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about. Stop spreading lies.

Macintel?

[tepples]

It is just a thought BUT maybe they are using Macs - I run a Mac and the Mac version of Word excel, Power Point cannot read the new version of 2007 Office. By "Macs" do you mean "Mac computers with PowerPC processors"? Or have you found specific problems with Office 2007 on Windows XP on Intel-based Mac hardware?

Re:Macintel?

[billsoxs]

By "Macs" do you mean "Mac computers with PowerPC processors"?

I guess that I do. I have a ~7 year old G3 that is running just fine. I know editors of journals - they are not flush with cash and I would expect that they also have older machines. Even still, a store bought XP license is not cheap - and academic types ARE cheap.

Vault Disney

[tepples]

Why oh why did we ever buy any office suits after [Office 97]? Because you bought new computers after Microsoft published a new version of proprietary Microsoft Office software, and Microsoft wouldn't license you the old version for use on these computers.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[OldChemist]

I think you've nailed it here. To collaborate with my students we typically do things in word. I highlight problems in yellow and add my suggestions highlighted in magenta. I know there are more "sophisticated" ways to do this, but it works for us... As for submission, as most have pointed out it is a matter of discipline. The small number of equations and problems with them is not usually a difficulty for biologists and (non-theoretical) chemists. Mathematicians and (some) engineers find Tex/Latex much easier to use than Word/equation editor. By the way, I LOVE Lyx/Latex and use it when I can. All of the touted advantages including excellent control of typography are there. It is just problematic when exchanging revised versions of stuff with students.

CMYK ... hardly a must-have?

[toby]

the lack of proper CYMK support in GIMP is a bit of a setback

In pre-press, yes (most of my career is in digital graphic arts). In scientific imaging, is it really a must-have feature? It's very hard to imagine CMYK being useful at all; it's entirely based on the properties of particular printing inks.

Even its importance in pre-press is waning, as the industry has already moved away from pre-separated film-based imagery (transparencies drum scanned to CMYK) and towards digital images in native RGB. I know that a lot of my time in the past 5 years was spent learning how to colour-correct and separate RGB images directly (a lot of photographers - who might have been top notch in film - produce awful digital shots).

Can you tell me then... why Photoshop's admittedly excellent CMYK support is important to scientific image processing?? Is it in order to provide separations of RGB images for publication? Even in the rare case that a magazine has provided sensible and complete specifications for its separations, that's not a task that most Photoshop users are competent to do, in any case (trust me :).

Re:CMYK ... hardly a must-have?

[RDW]

Some journals are certainly still geared up to use CMYK. See for example:

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=1078

If they request CMYK and you send them RGB they'll probably just do a 'one click conversion' to CMYK, so it's better to sort this out yourself in advance if the colour is critical. On the other hand, some journals do indeed specify RGB, especially now that most people read the online editions:

http://www.jhc.org/misc/guidelines_figs.shtml

Academic licenses for PS are pretty reasonably priced in any case, while the 16-bit support, colour management and (for many scientists) familiar interface are significant advantages of PS over GIMP.

Re:CMYK ... hardly a must-have?

[Awel]

The printing process is still based on four-colour CMYK: even if the files are sent digitally to the printer, the physical inks are still cyan, magenta, yellow and black, and the printer still needs to be told which goes where. Of course, it is trivial these days to convert from RGB to CMYK in production, so it's really not a major problem if they are supplied in the wrong format. A bigger deal is when we get colour pictures for a black-and-white journal; converting to greyscale is no problem in itself, but it's rare that the author thought about the need to distinguish by shade and contrast rather than by colour. Then they complain that things that were very different colours (say, dark blue and bright red) in the original now look almost identical.

My big gripe, though, is authors supplying their figures in Powerpoint format. OK, so maybe it's the only vector-based artwork package they can lay their hands on or know how to use (or maybe they're just recycling the slides from their last presentation), but Powerpoint's transparency handling is broken, and it uses transparency to produce hatching. So unless you're very careful and prepared to jigger about with the figures, all the cross-hatching on the bar graphs will disappear and you'll get a series of identical blank bars. Please everyone, use a proper vector drawing program and send your graphs as EPS files!

Re:CMYK ... hardly a must-have?

[toby]

it is trivial these days to convert from RGB to CMYK in production,

Indeed, and I mentioned this above. In fact, it's been trivial since Photoshop 1.0 was released (it always did good separations). However, there is no reason why the author should make such separations, and it's usually best if they don't try, as the result is rarely going to be optimal for the particular publication, despite Photoshop's abilities.

Your point about Powerpoint is very familiar to graphic arts people and bureau operators. Anything except EPS/PDF is likely to reproduce incorrectly (and even then, there are many gotchas). This has been true since the emergence of PostScript based digital pre-press (more than 20 years now).

There is no way to safely avoid a proper approval process (round tripping proofs to authors) because of the myriad ways things can screw up undetected. Just as the paper author is not expert in making separations, the bureau/printer staff are likely to miss errors in a proof that are obvious to the author.

Never get the bureau or printer to make corrections: They frequently introduce new errors in doing so. (I'm speaking from long experience:); and never allow anything to be printed without seeing a "contract" or approval proof first - you will eventually suffer embarrassment or worse.

Re:CMYK ... hardly a must-have?

[toby]

Some journals are certainly still geared up to use CMYK.

Of course they are. This doesn't change my point at all.

My assertion is that Photoshop's CMYK features are not needed, and in fact, it's a bad idea for authors to make their own separations (in my experience). The publication should do it, and take responsibility for them.

However, with some features of CS3, Adobe is indeed making a play for the scientific image processing market, having saturated graphic arts. This rarely works out. When the monopoly player's only remaining strategy is to conquer new vertical markets adequately served by existing third parties, the results are usually the worst of both worlds (cf: Microsoft).

Re:CMYK ... hardly a must-have?

[semiotec]

many many journals don't like getting figures submitted in RGB, because often the conversion to CMYK looks quite bad, since the colour space do not correspond 100% (as I understand it). The problem as I understand is that CMYK looks more like how it's going to turn out on paper, and while colour in figures is not always important, sometimes it's crucial.

The publication does not want to take responsibility. The scientific journal publishing is totally different from the normal book/magazine publication. In almost all cases, the authors have to pay to get things published, and there is NO royalty. Authors do not make money out of the publications. Or at least not directly, since publication is related to whether you can get your future funding, so it is in a sense related, but certainly not royalties.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[shellbeach]

Or heck, a math professor my husband had in grad school, who used LaTeX because that's standard but used a WYSIWIG editor (and barely could use that) because the actual markup was far beyond him. What's wrong with using LyX to write latex? I use it all the time, and I can assure you it's a lot faster to write and easier to read than raw markup ...

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[devbiowonk]

Dude, you owe me some money. Just go to any large biology lab and take a look at the post-docs! Most of them will be beaten down "push overs" and I am sure they will use any computer program that their PI provides for them. As for what they think of the journals, I think almost all scientists are in agreement on that one.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[porcupine8]

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it - but this prof was using it mainly *because* he was not that computer-literate and could not have dealt with the raw markup. I'm just challenging the idea that everyone with a PhD is a computer whiz who can or will make informed decisions about which products to use for which purposes.

You don't even want to hear what I went through when I tried to suggest once that PageMaker or InDesign would be more appropriate for one of our projects than Word... It doesn't matter what the right tool for the job is, some people know how to use a hammer and will use that hammer to drive a screw in no matter what you tell them about these newfangled "screwdrivers". (Thank goodness, I'm in a more computer-literate department now and we ARE using InDesign for a similar project.)

Re:about my sig

[WilliamSChips]

You know, maybe if you ignore Twitter, he'll stop trying to slander the FOSS movement.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[WilliamSChips]

I'd give the list to the OpenOffice and Abiword people. Having used successive versions of OO I know that they improve with each successive version.

WordPerfect is alive!!!

[randmairs]

You can still purchase WordPerfect, http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Conte nt/1150905725000

Word is a pain at removing hidden codes while WordPerfect's Reveal Codes makes it extrememly easy to spot the problem and to delete it. I often cut and paste from Word into WordPerfect to get rid of Word's hidden codes. For instance, I was recently given an MS Word document with double pagination. My secretary spent several hours trying to get rid of it. I cut and pasted the document into WordPerfect and was done correcting the problem in a matter of minutes.

I don't hate MS because its MS. I hate MS because of what they have done to fine products that are not theirs.

Re:Take a deep breath

[WilliamSChips]

Twitter is annoying(I wouldn't be surprised if he's a Microsoft plant put here to slander/COINTELPRO the FOSS movement) but that list(and all the other idiots who follow his every move, hanging on his every word as if it were God's) is even more annoying. It has the taste of laws that dictate things like "anti-social behavior" and all those other clever euphemisms. I stopped using the creative spellings months ago because they don't actually help my argument but if the creative spellings are all you can call him on he's doing pretty well.

Re:IMO they should just upgrade and start acceptin

[Awel]

Is this equation editor based on a version of MathType? MathType is what the non-LaTeX-using production offices use to set equations. The previous version of Equation Editor was based on a (very) old version of MathType, and so equations embedded in pre-2007 Word can be imported and set correctly using the current MathType (much improved over the version that went into Word). If Word 2007's is based on something else, it's possible that this could break the equation imports, and this could be a reason for the rejection of Word 2007 format.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Puff Daddy]

You are so wrong it hurts. I spent 3 of my years in college doing audio/visual tech support. We got ridiculous calls from professors in EVERY field. Even the good professors didn't always care about finding the best tool for the job so long as they could get the job done quickly so that they could move on to the next one. I had a bioinformatics professor who would write his journal articles in Word and would produce graphs in Excel, edit the graph image in Powerpoint, use print screen to bring the image into paint, and copy it into his Word document. He could program in several languages and was reasonably savvy with Linux, but this was the tool he found and it got the job done. Other professors who were well respected in their field just could not be bothered to care about computers. They used whatever their grad students told them would work. As for the journals comment, you must be more specific. Most professors I've spoken to despise the traditional system of extremely overpriced and under-reviewed journals that they must, in some cases, actually pay to get into. That said, those in the know have a good deal of respect for some of the newer open access journals. I was told more than once that if I am ever to publish I should strive to be published in an open journal and make an effort to cite other open journals in my research.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[WilliamSChips]

Leonhard Euler, one of the best mathematicians of all time, lost his eyesight halfway or so through his life and had to have his sons do all his reading and writing for him. When I wrote this I think I had a point but I think it would be better to let people just infer points.

You didn't read my post...

[Eric Damron]

I didn't say we purchased Office 2007. We get attachments from other State Departments who have.

I didn't "blame" anyone in my post. I just expressed my frustration at the fact that others send us attachments that we can't use and that fact is putting pressure on us to "upgrade" to a product that gives us nothing. Frankly my time could be better spent than doing a long drawn out conversion that yields no benefits! I'm not even sure what the compelling reason would be for anyone to move to Office 2007 except that older versions of Office will lose Microsoft's support.

Now although I didn't assign blame in my last post, if you want to get into that discussion I am more than willing.

Re:You didn't read my post...

[DavidD_CA]

Sorry about that. I missed the word "files" and thought the worst.

I wonder why you can't open the 2007 attachments, though. Have you installed the viewers on all of the computers? Compatibility should be a non-issue, I would think.

I am surprised you've got State departments who are already on 2007. Here in California, most of the State just upgraded to 2002 or 2003 in some cases.

Re:You didn't read my post...

[Eric Damron]

We are several versions behind also. I don't know why agency's are upgrading to the bleeding edge so quickly. Maybe it's because it's Washington State and Redmond is influential here. We're also being pressured to upgrade from XP to Vista.

Vista would be bad enough but if we get pushed into a quick upgrade to Office 2007 I see visions of our users with torches and pitchforks. I only hope that the door will be thick enough to keep them out!.

Re:You didn't read my post...

[DavidD_CA]

That's what firewalls are for (not the networking kind).

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[budgenator]

Implementing TeX is cumbersome and irritating, and with rather little benefit given that many major journals have (wisely) chosen to go with the most popular format
I was helping the wife, with a paper she was doing on her Windows (XP SP2 )machine, so I installed MiTeX and it was dreadfully difficult. I had Horrendous file permission problems (LUA set up for security), and trying to use wordpad to edit LaTeX file was just crazy stupid, it kept changing to unrecognized characters such as changing the second opening quote to a closing quote. So I agree with you, assuming your using Windows, however LaTeX is mature and a joy to use in Linux, its a world of difference.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A while ago, I might have considered that. However, I have gone to the trouble of filing detailed bug reports with various big name OSS packages, OpenOffice among them, and watched those reports get essentially ignored (or, even more disappointing, flagged as not being a bug by some developer when I and many other users clearly thought it was). I no longer bother filing bugs on the big name projects, because I have seen literally zero results from doing so, even where things I filed or voted for have become among the most-requested features and sat on the bug database for literally years.

Today, I'd rather spend my time sending messages of support or donations to individuals or small teams who also produce software I also find useful/enjoyable. These people tend to be genuinely grateful IME. They do listen, they don't make me jump through hoops to try and help them, and just a quick vote of thanks or a little financial support seems to make a real difference.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[INowRegretThesePosts]

If you have to use Windows, you can at least use good tools for it.

Firefox, Openoffice, and (relevant to your case) EMACS are available to Windows.

Of course, using GNU/Linux is much better.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[SanityInAnarchy]

The average user cattle doesn't care about the data format war, only the technical folks.

It is important, though.

Let me put it this way: In 100 years, Microsoft will most likely not exist, nor will any of our current word processors. (That's not meant to be a political statement; Linux won't exist, or won't be recognizable.) Which format do you think is more likely to be readable then?

I think it's ODF, but in any case, it's an important question. If you're doing scientific work, presumably you do hope to publish some hugely important paper that people will still want to read in 50 or 100 years -- something like General Relativity. And of course, even if it's not successful, presumably at some point, you or someone else in the field will want to refer to your earlier work.

It's a bit like DRM. The average user doesn't care about DRM, but they hate it when their brand new HDTV goes black for some reason, or when they can't skip the previews on a DVD, or when they have to buy the same damned thing in 20 different formats for no reason.

It's not that users don't care about technical debates. What's really going on is, users do care, and do get pissed off when things don't work. But they don't want to know why something doesn't work, they just want it fixed. That's why we see people who don't maintain their computers at all, get loaded up with spyware, and then just buy a new one or pay GeekSquad to run Spybot.

It's a bit like never changing the oil in your car, and constantly raving that you shouldn't have to change the oil, and buying a new car when your old engine dies because you refused to learn anything about it.

So it's not that users don't care, it's that users desperately want to avoid ever having to think about something that isn't their area of expertise.

Personally, I think users should care about the format war if they care about the consequences of the format war, and most do.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Kymermosst]

trying to use wordpad to edit LaTeX file was just crazy stupid

Yeah, especially since there are about a dozen good free text editors for Windows out there that do the job properly and will even syntax-highlight your LaTeX source.

good point... but

[toby]

The publication does not want to take responsibility.

It is true that RGB->CMYK separation is non-linear, non-reversible, and for optimal results depends on complex details of the actual printing process. Asking for CMYK images is certainly not a solution, for all those reasons, and fundamentally there is no assurance that what the author sees is what will be printed, even - or especially - if she delivers a CMYK file.

Consider what the author is "seeing", and imagines she'll see on paper: Is it an image on her CRT (likely to be wildly different from the magazine she'll have in her hand later)? Is it an image from her desktop printer (ditto)? The only way the author can have confidence in what her picture will look like, is if the publication provides a "contract proof", with adequate time for a revision cycle, before publication. That's the traditional way.

The digital workflow introduces more room for error, because 1) the author generally isn't trained to make separations, even if the publication provides a specification (those are often ambiguous and confusing); 2) the author isn't equipped to proof them; 3) the author usually won't understand the limitations of the rest of the production process, and she'll eventually have to suck it up when it goes pear-shaped and the picture is nothing like she imagined it would be.

Of course this can all happen with RGB submissions too, but there are fewer pitfalls. For example, a well-trained separator will recognise if an image has a lot of colours outside CMYK's reproducible gamut, and can bring this problem to the author's attention. If properly configured, Photoshop can produce a decent 'soft proof' which will reveal such problems. But the devil is in the details, and 99% of users won't have the training to configure it (and virtually no scientific authors will have calibrated monitors).

The crucial ingredient here - often skipped - is the proof/approval process. A colour-calibrated PDF is better than nothing, but still depends on the viewing conditions.

Re:good point... but

[RDW]

I think you're greatly overestimating the amount of care that a typical scientific journal takes in preparing images for publication, and the level of knowledge of some of their staff. If you send an RGB image to a journal that requires CMYK, I would bet money that in many cases one of the journal staff will just go into Photoshop and hit Image->Mode->CMYK Colour. This approach requires very little training! The authors, of course, have no control over the submission policy of the journal, and are just doing their best to comply with (as you say) often ambiguous and not particularly logical guidelines. If they ask for CMYK at 300 ppi, then that's what you give them (and yes, there are generally proofs to check exactly how much they've screwed things up). Photoshop at least makes it straightforward to satisfy these requirements, and its use in handling scientific images is nothing new (it was, after all, the only serious option for several years after its introduction, which gave it the same foothold in science it has everywhere else).

if "what you wanted" is the LaTeX look

[r00t]

Pretty much anything written with LaTeX has that ugly LaTeX look.

I'm sure you could write lots of TeX code to avoid this, but then you've given the "fairly quickly" advantage to Word.

Re:if "what you wanted" is the LaTeX look

[PDAllen]

I'm not quite sure what you mean here - OK, not appropriate if you want to produce an advert or something, but that's not what LaTeX is for.

Assuming the content is sensible, the styling you get will be readable (which is most of what's important for a paper in a journal) and the journal can (assuming the author hasn't done unpleasant things to get his own style in the document) simply tack their styling headers onto essentially the original LaTeX to get an output in the journal's style - that means that you can publish ten papers that look like they belong together (i.e. the styling doesn't change from one to the next) in an issue with not too much effort, rather than having to pay a staff to retype all the papers into a house style.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I only have a short time here, so I'll just summarise a few of the major problems with Writer, relative to Word:

• PDF export is fundamentally broken: when dealing with certain OpenType fonts (such as almost all pro grade fonts from major foundries supplied today), they are substituted with some other font in the output PDF. Worse, you don't get to find out that it's broken and there's no workaround until after you've spent all your time creating and laying out your document. I've even been told that this isn't a bug, it's just a missing feature!
• Mail merge is fundamentally broken: the data sources model is screwed up in several ways, even in the more recent versions of OO, and there are basic things in terms of output to file rather than printer that still don't seem to be possible.
• Support for styles is weak: theoretically Writer can do more than Word, but things like the numbering schemes are so buggy that much of the power is not usable in practice. Basic things like being able to assign styles or reset manual formatting to the style defaults are needlessly difficult or impossible, while they're just a keyboard shortcut away in Word.
• Usability is poor in many places: dialog layout is confused, help text isn't helpful, navigation is poor around things like contents and tables; it isn't even close to as user-friendly as Word, even before the 2007 UI changes.
• The automation model in OO is weak and clumsy.

One can identify similarly serious shortcomings in Calc vs. Excel: regression lines are a common area of complaint, and again there is poor usability, poor automation, etc.

These are things where I specifically find Office to have much better applications. One could make many, many other criticisms that apply to both product suites. See my posts in this discussion for more.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ozmanjusri]

I only have a short time here, so I'll just summarise a few of the major problems with Writer, relative to Word:

You did say you already had a list. Can't you just post it?

PDF export is fundamentally broken: when dealing with certain OpenType fonts (such as almost all pro grade fonts from major foundries supplied today), they are substituted with some other font in the output PDF. Worse, you don't get to find out that it's broken and there's no workaround until after you've spent all your time creating and laying out your document. I've even been told that this isn't a bug, it's just a missing feature!

Um, Word has no PDF export at all.

Mail merge is fundamentally broken: the data sources model is screwed up in several ways, even in the more recent versions of OO, and there are basic things in terms of output to file rather than printer that still don't seem to be possible. I don't know what you're doing, but mail merge works fine for me. Have you tried using the mail merge wizard? As far as your problem with output to file, you can specify the output of a mail merge as "Save, Print or Send", so outputting to files is one of your basic choices.

Support for styles is weak: theoretically Writer can do more than Word, but things like the numbering schemes are so buggy that much of the power is not usable in practice. Basic things like being able to assign styles or reset manual formatting to the style defaults are needlessly difficult or impossible, while they're just a keyboard shortcut away in Word.

Um, numbering in OOo has always been better and more manageable than in Word. It was one of the reasons I switched in the first place. As far as styles go, selecting the text, then double-clicking the style in the style window is too hard for you? You could assign shortcut keys in Tools/Customize/Keyboard, if you want it to work exactly like Word.

Usability is poor in many places: dialog layout is confused, help text isn't helpful, navigation is poor around things like contents and tables; it isn't even close to as user-friendly as Word, even before the 2007 UI changes.

That's just a rant, and expresses your opinion. There's nothing in there I can address directly.

The automation model in OO is weak and clumsy.

It's almost identical to Word's, with the exception that it allows the use of other languages than VBA. Do you have anything specific about it that you don't like?

One can identify similarly serious shortcomings in Calc vs. Excel: regression lines are a common area of complaint, and again there is poor usability, poor automation, etc.

These are things where I specifically find Office to have much better applications. One could make many, many other criticisms that apply to both product suites. See my posts in this discussion for more.

But nothing specific that anyone can actually address?

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Ah, sorry, I was feeding the troll. My mistake. However, since you force me to defend my claims, let me be blunt and ruthlessly objective:

Um, Word has no PDF export at all.

Word 2007 can save to PDF. I can get a valid PDF right out of Word. I cannot get a valid PDF out of Writer with the fonts correct, short of relying on third party software.

I don't know what you're doing, but mail merge works fine for me. [...] As far as your problem with output to file, you can specify the output of a mail merge as "Save, Print or Send", so outputting to files is one of your basic choices.

Mail merging can be done to a separate file for each record, but not to a single file for all records that can then be tweaked as necessary. The ability to make minor customisations to merged documents before printing is a fundamental feature of any half-decent mail merge facility. Even printing to files fails without error message if you type an output directory that doesn't yet exist, rather than doing something useful like prompting to create it.

Mail merge in recent OO versions is also fundamentally broken in its reliance on the database module. What's with generating crap all over my root directory every time I add a new data source? Why can't I delete old data sources I no longer need to keep the system clean? Why, after four hours of searching the on-line help, OO web site and web generally, could I not find any reference to these things, or to the fact that without Base installed, the mail merge dialog just appears half-blank and the merge itself doesn't work properly?

Um, numbering in OOo has always been better and more manageable than in Word.

It would be if it worked. Alas, numbering in OO Writer is so bug-ridden that I don't see how you can possibly defend it. Nested numbering, linking with styles, and starting/stopping lists all have basic bugs in them that I've run into several times, though I've never worked out exactly what triggers them.

As far as styles go, selecting the text, then double-clicking the style in the style window is too hard for you? You could assign shortcut keys in Tools/Customize/Keyboard, if you want it to work exactly like Word.

No, messing around scrolling up and down lists (which constantly flip back to some default display mode even if I changed it earlier) to find what I want is not acceptable. Styles are things people should be encouraged to use. Hiding shortcut keys for them somewhere completely different from where everything else is set up sucks. Relying on an ambiguous "Default" command on the context menu to remove manual formatting sucks. Not being able to reset a derived style to match its parent properties once you've changed anything sucks. This is all basic stuff, fundamental to making styles a useful feature.

That's just a rant, and expresses your opinion. There's nothing in there I can address directly.

What do you want, a list of 100 different usability gremlins in OpenOffice? How about starting with help buttons on all dialog boxes that actually work, and take you to help text that really tells the user what the significance of the different options is?

Try this: in Writer, create yourself a table at the start of the document, and then move the cursor to just before it, so you can insert new material right at the top of the document. Try the same creating a table of contents at the top instead of a table, with the table of contents set not to allow manual modifications. Annoying, isn't it?

Try setting up a fixed-width table in Writer that isn't full-width on the page, and then setting the widths of the various columns. You have to go rearrange the options on other t

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[ozmanjusri]

Trolling for disagreeing with you. Right.

Beware the backdoor

[dbIII]

There's stuff like "salary sacrifice" that lets clueless accountants authorise purchases of laptops that are used half and work and half at home without the IT department finding out until it's too late. That's how I get to look after virus and spyware riddled Vista machines suddenly trying to connect to an NT4+samba domain. Of course they didn't get any antivirus since Vista is invincible, went to lots of spyware spreading porn sites becuase the company doesn't really own the machine and can't get on the domain becuase they have the cut down hobby version of Vista which probably isn't legal for work purposes anyway. Yes I did put linux on it - but it still has Vista to be used at home and hopefully not get reinfected after the fresh install and antivirus.

Re:Beware the backdoor

[DavidD_CA]

Couldn't you tell your router/switch not to even let the machine connect unless its in your list of "trusted" MAC addresses?

Then create a policy whereby external machines have to meet specific requirements to be allowed into the list.

Basically, you cover your ass. If your superior says "that's too secure" then at least you can point to someone else when it becomes a problem.

You could even get more sophisticated with the access list, configuring it in such as way that any unauthorized people can have internet access, but not internal network access.

Re:Beware the backdoor

[dbIII]

You can but that makes you a bastard that has made the reduction in salary negotiated between a feild technician and a seventeen year old assistant accountant pointless - which would result in anger and tears. They have taken a salary hit already for something the company should provide, got an unsuitable system and the best that can be done is to try to close this purchasing backdoor from people who should not have authority to buy anything without supervision and get the guy on the network as best as can be done.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[codekavi]

what about handwritten manuscripts?

Re:Plain text

[buga]

What about tables, graphs, and equations? While you can use images to represent these, it makes it harder for other people to modify them later. LaTeX is easier to read and write than XML and is an open format.

Re:Why use Doc at all?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

No, trolling because you don't seem to be interested in a real discussion. Your previous reply dismissed my earlier comments as being without specifics you could address, despite my citing a whole thread full of them, and you made patronising comments that simply aren't true. I have now provided further, very specific examples in the areas where I wasn't explicit in my earlier post. Would you like to address any of them now?

Office 2007 Equation Editor is really great!

[adah]

Please have a look at the Microsoft blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archiv e/2006/10/04/Equations-in-Word-2007.aspx

It is based on something less proprietary, and more TeX-like. The output is nicer too. I believe Nature and Science will accept the new .docx format some time. The ODF recommendation does not make sense, simply because no authors will be using it.