Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!noao!rstevens
From: rstevens@noao.edu (Rich Stevens)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Good WPs for books?
Message-ID: <1991Mar29.153950.14942@noao.edu>
Date: 29 Mar 91 15:39:50 GMT
References: <1991Mar23.145145.23613@canon.co.uk> <1571@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> <1048@hrshcx.csd.harris.com>
Organization: National Optical Astronomy Observatories, Tucson AZ
Lines: 43

> This leads me to another point, namely your book.  My father-in-law is
> currently on his second book (pharmacology texts).  He is using TeX because
> publishers readily accept it and it is a true typseting language (its also
> free).

Two points.  First, publishers these days just want camera-ready copy
that meets their design specs.  Two I'm familiar with (Prentice Hall
and Addison Wesley) could care less what software you produce it with.
The actual typesetting houses that produce the camera-ready copy (for
those of us without our own typesetters in-house) can take PostScript,
regardless how it was produced.

Second, 95% of troff is now free, with GNU's groff.  All that's
missing are grap and the latest page making software from DWB 3.1.

> Another reference to the useability of roff was in the preface of a Unix
> text.  The authors comments basically said that it was far too difficult
> to get troff to do what they needed and what the publisher wanted.  They
> concluded with the following statement:  "we have concluded that there
> must be a better way."

This sounds like the next-to-last paragraph in the Preface of the
BSD daemon book.

Another relevant quote is from Brian Kernighan's report "A Typesetter-
independent TROFF" (Bell Labs CSTR 97, 1981):

	"My first thought (a thought shared by many others) was that this
	would be a glorious opportunity to replace TROFF with a new
	formatting language: better designed, easier to work with,
	and of course much faster.  This remains a desireable goal,
	but, after quite a bit of thought spread over several years,
	I am still not really much closer to a better design, let alone
	an implementation.

> The best thing to do is to talk with those who write on their own systems
> (e.g., local independent writers, newspaper contributors, others who did
> what you want to do).

Just be aware that producing a large book is quite different from
producing newspaper articles or marketing brochures.

	Rich Stevens  (rstevens@noao.edu)