Dave,
I have a different experience from Jim. I used LaTeX for years but
switched over to Word for reasons listed below. Interestingly, LaTeX is
becoming the processor of choice among Reed undergrads who are attracted
to its nerdiness--as well as it's superior ability to handle large
multichapter documents (the senior thesis).
I was surprised to get a JOP revision letter recently that said they'd
accept a LaTeX document. One of the reasons I switched is that
journals all wanted *.doc submissions, and I found the conversion to be
a major hassle. The other problem I found is co-authorship--few of my
collaborators worked with LaTeX.
However, I might switch back myself for the purposes of sole authored
pieces and book manuscripts if I could get some confirmation of journal
and book publisher acceptability. Jim says they take PDF. Is this true
for the FINAL copy? And what about the major academic publishers? Do
they require Word? PDF?
Jim Battista wrote:
> Dave Armstrong wrote:
>
>
>> I gave an introduction to LaTeX workshop yesterday at the ICPSR Summer
>> Program that was relatively well attended. However, I heard a rumor that
>> AJPS is no longer accepting LaTeX documents and one member of the audience
>> asked if this is going to become a trend among all of the major Political
>> Science journals? So I write to ask two questions:
>>
>> 1) Is the rumor true and if so, are we likely to see more journals heading
>> in this direction?
>>
>
> Did AJPS ever accept .tex documents? ISTR that they only
> accepted PDFs generated by TeX, not TeX documents themselves.
>
>
>> 2) What advice should I give to these folks who are getting ready to invest
>> a reasonable amount of time and energy in learning the quirks and
>> intricacies of LaTeX document processing?
>>
>
> LaTeX is still deeply worthwhile. It's a far more organized
> tool for writing, it has hugely powerful tools available (not
> least BibTeX), its files won't be broken after another MS
> revision, and so on. Also keeping things in LaTeX makes it
> easier to switch parts of a paper over to a pdfslide / beamer /
> whatever presentation, and beamer presentations look
> approximately a jillion times better than your average powerpoint.
>
> Most of the places I've published have wanted Word files as
> final manuscripts. I'm in the Wintel world, and I've just
> converted the .tex file using latex2rtf, a free/OSS utility. It
> does fine, even for math and tables, but has some limitations
> with addon packages. Mostly it just ignores them rather than
> causing errors, so it's easy to live with. Its output has
> terrible formatting, but that's not generally an issue as
> everything's been accepted and you're handing off to the
> typesetter or copy-editor.
>
> The only real accommodation I've had to make to the process is
> entering citations manually and replacing the various \cites
> with \nocites. That is, instead of putting in:
>
> \citeasnoun{foo1999} argued that \citeasnoun{bar2000} is a
> gibbering idiot
>
> I put that in as:
>
> Foo (1999) \nocite{foo1999} argued that Bar (2000)
> \nocite{bar2000} is a gibbering idiot
>
> This keeps latex2rtf from getting confused about what exactly
> \citeasnoun and \citeyear and so on are.
>
> It's possible that latex2rtf has been updated to better deal
> with this; there seems to be relatively consistent progress on it.
>
> Also, you might need to convert .eps figures to something a
> Word/RTF file can easily include. This is just a matter of
> opening and resaving in a graphics editor, especially since
> almost everywhere wants them as separate files anyway.
>
> Anyhow, it hasn't been a problem. It adds ~1/2 hour to the
> final stage of publishing a paper, but it seems to me that I
> save more time than that along the rest of the production process.
>
> --
> James S. Coleman Battista
> Dept. of Political Science, Univ. of North Texas
> [log in to unmask] (940)565-4960
>
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