Re: [Groff] Creating Word/rtf output

[Peter Schaffter]

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009, Ted Harding wrote:
> Some publishers, indeed, will happily work with UNIX troff or
> GNU groff. Not only O'Reilly (that goes without saying), but
> also Harper-Collins, with whom I have done some work on their
> multilingual dictionaries. They had a program to convert from
> XML (which is what the dictionaries were initially composed in)
> to troff. I was also able to write 'awk' routines to do the
> same sort of thing, but with refinements. The resulting troff
> source was then sent off to their printers, who could deal with
> it as it stood (again, bless them!).

Funny this thread should have started just at the time I was about
to raise the issue.  I'm putting the finishing touches on my latest
novel.  Needless to say, the manuscript was created with groff and
I've been wracking my brains to come up with a strategy to get the
thing into RTF.  While O'Reilly and Harper-Collins and university
presses may be happy with troff/groff, publishers of fiction are
not.  At least not in my experience.  Very, very annoying.  Small
presses, especially, don't seem to know what to do with flat text
files, and many insist on "electronic" submissions of manuscripts
for copy editing.  Worse, even though I can produce a gorgeous
camera-ready version, offering to do so is, in the novel publishing
world, a faux pas.  It's considered amateurish, even when the author
has thirty years of typesetting and book design experience under his
belt.  (Sometimes, I want to slaughter the gatekeepers.)

>From what I'm reading on this thread, it looks as if I'd better get
started on that groff-formatted-flat-text-to-RTF sed script I've
been putting off for the past year.  Does anyone know where I can
get my hands on a free, online copy of RTF standards?  Even though
it's only a manuscript, the novel is typographically complex so I
really need to know what I'm doing.

BTW, while the mom macros homepage is still down--and probably will
be for some time--I once again have a real email address at

    address@hidden

-- 
Peter Schaffter