[lug] LaTeX to Word Doc/RTF

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Daniel Webb wrote:

> On 19 Feb 2002, Ed Hill wrote:
> 
> > Doesn't surprise me at all.  Plenty of journals have never used (La)TeX
> > and probably never will.
> 
>   What do most journals use, by the way?  I have only published once at
> this point, and we submitted in Word (this was before I knew LaTeX).  Now
> that I have used LaTeX for a while, using Word is like pulling teeth.

Depends a great deal on your definition of "most".  As Dr. Hill has
repeated noted, LaTeX is particularly strong in its ability to typeset
equations.  For this reason, LaTeX has been a commonly accepted format in
the scholarly, technical, and scientific areas.  If you were writing for
a non-technical publication I'm not certain how common LaTeX would have
been, although it is likely that before going to press your submission was
typeset using a typesetting engine such as LaTeX.

The point I was trying to make yesterday is that it appears that LaTeX may
be losing ground even in some of these areas.  For instance the IEEE used
to accept LaTeX for their publications, this doesn't seem to be the case
anymore, see
<http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/magazines/submit.htm>.  Even BIPM
(the people who maintain the metric system) appear to like MSWord although
they do still say they still accept LaTeX
<http://www.bipm.fr/metrologia/instructions.html>.  However, I did
recently submit a paper for Metrologia in LaTeX format, but it didn't go
particularly smoothly.  The people on the other end made some errors in
running LaTeX and BibTeX so there were some issues with the editorial
review process.  When I had a paper published by the Microwave Journal two
years ago, the guy on the other end had never even heard of LaTeX.

So, my gut feeling (yes feeling) is that LaTeX "may" be losing ground and
ultimately may be replaced by an XML or Docbook type of processing
language, but probably wrapped by some sort of word processing
environment.  I was curious if anyone out here had anything to support or
deny this general feeling?  As always, mathematical typesetting seems to
be the sticking point.  LaTeX is good at mathematics.  Docbook much less
so, but it seems that there may be work underway in this area

   http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/dbtexmath/
   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-MathML/

The really sticky issue is that the general public doesn't like the feel
of writing in a textual language such as LaTeX.  However, to be fair the
general public also doesn't usually write many complex mathematical texts
either.  I've been told that this was why the math editor in MSWord was
removed from the default installation.

Comments?

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)

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                        ISART 2002                          
    International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies 
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