In order to see what is needed in book writing applications, you need
to look carefully at the desk of someone who is actively writing a
book. You will most likely see piles of paper, often cut up and marked
with pencil, and if you examine those of the papers that are in piles,
you will see that the pagination is all over the place because pages
have been reordered. Read on...
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Member since:2005-11-18
That hasn't been my experience at all. Because typically PDF files are not editable. And I have actuallyy never worked with a publisher who wanted camera ready copies. In fact, most of them specifically say they *do not* want camera ready files. They have their own layouts that are common for their imprint ect, and they have people whos job it is to make sure your manuscript conforms to that layout.
Interesting! Maybe this differs per country or field of science. Maybe the books you submitted were part of a series with a uniform layout? At any rate, the change that we have noticed is that publishers have started to offload more and more over time. Editing and making the layout is not done by them anymore, they basically print it, and that's all. For them, it gives a wider margin. And no, these are not cheap publishers, but established and well-known academic publishers.
Then again. Most good UNIX books were typesetted by the authors, and submited as a camera-ready copy.
No publisher I have ever worked with wants you to do your own formatting. They have templates with special tags they want you to use for various level headings, figures, etc. The Word document is not at all WYSIWYG and looks nothing at all like what the final product will look like.
I have no experience with such templates.
Member since:2005-10-08
"Maybe the books you submitted were part of a series with a uniform layout?"
Well, most common publishers (at least in IT) have specific formats for specific series. O'Reilly for example has a certain way they want headings to look for their animal books, and certain formatting conventions for tips, warnings, code listings, new terms, commands to be typed, etc. They also, of course, have certain icons that they use for tips, warnings, and so on. Their Developers Notebook series, and their Head First series, of course, have other stylistic conventions. If you saw a few inside pages from an O'Reilly book, and you didn;t know what series it was from, chances are you could guess just from the stylistic conventions without even knowing the title.
Part of what makes a Head Start book, a Head Start book, or an animal book an animal book, are those formatting, layout, and style conventions. So they generally don't want authors giving them camera ready art, or WYSIWYG documents.
Some of the layout and formatting would probably be almost impossible for authors to do unless they were desktop publishing experts. For example, people with thought bubbles coming out of their heads are common in the Head Start series. That kind of thing is not easily done in any of the tools mentioned. (And even for authors that do decide to do it on their own, it usually requires a fair amount of experience and skill to make this kind of thing look right, so the publishers will typically have their own design staff redraw them anyway).
Typically, in my expierence, writing IT books has been more like writing HTML the way we used to do it. We just use tags to say what we want, even in Word, without worrying about what it actually looks like. Example, [H1] for a level 1 heading [H2] for level two [Li] for list item, and so on. The Word templates often have macros that the publisher can then run to look for these tags and remove them, while converting the following text to the desired style and such.
Member since:
2005-10-08
"First of all, it is simply false that most publishers prefer Word documents. Many publishers prefer camera-ready copies or PDF files. This gives authors and editors pretty much freedom."
That hasn't been my experience at all. Because typically PDF files are not editable. And I have actuallyy never worked with a publisher who wanted camera ready copies. In fact, most of them specifically say they *do not* want camera ready files. They have their own layouts that are common for their imprint ect, and they have people whos job it is to make sure your manuscript conforms to that layout. So typically they will give you Word templates with tags. The Word documents end up looking nothing at all like the actual product would look.
The publishers I have dealt with have been in the IT field, and the entire process has been completely paperless until publication. All the writing and editing was done in Word. The final proof was a PDF (that was camera ready) where I had to note incorrectly placed figures and all that. But nothing left Word format until the final proof which was PDF.
"In *my* experience WYSIWYG word processors are really bad for formatting books. It is hard to get the layout consistent and tidy. Besides that the WYSIWYG interrupts writing and editing, since it is pretty distractive."
No publisher I have ever worked with wants you to do your own formatting. They have templates with special tags they want you to use for various level headings, figures, etc. The Word document is not at all WYSIWYG and looks nothing at all like what the final product will look like.
Edited 2005-12-21 04:25