On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 10:36:13AM -0500, Robert Goulding wrote:
Subject: [Groff] Creating Word/rtf output
OK, so I've almost finished writing an entire book with groff.
Nothing fancy involved: no equations or pictures, but LOTS of
footnotes and refer tags. I'm 2 weeks away from submitting the
manuscript, and have just let the editor know that I can send him
pdfs, and gnu troff source files -- or, if those really won't fly,
very simply formatted HTML files; to which he replies:
"GNU troff?? What is that? These days the publishers really want either
MSWord or TEX files. We can try the HTML result, but I predict lots of
issues in the typesetting! You'll be correcting proofs for weeks.
I always thought that publishers wanted well-typeset output.
Maybe some don't care ....
Why don't they let you produce the final pages for them? That
should save them a bundle. If the copy editor insists on on-line
editing, then maybe converting to HTML and putting the results
on a wiki for collaborative editing would work (I'm about to try
this myself with an author). Moving those changes back into your
groff source files should be a lot easier than dealing with the
footnote problems you mentioned.
If the copy editor edits on paper, then there shouldn't be any
issue at all, as long as the publisher gives you clear specs for
what they want for final pages. But I've been producing PDFs from
groff for printers for about fifteen years now, so there's
certainly no technical impediment to providing typeset pages to
publishers. (You better get the copyright page correct though.)
-- Steve