Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!columbia!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU!bryce From: bryce@COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Bryce Nesbitt) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: The article that was, even though I hadn't Message-ID: <8708032106.AA14158@cogsci.berkeley.edu> Date: Mon, 3-Aug-87 17:06:44 EDT Article-I.D.: cogsci.8708032106.AA14158 Posted: Mon Aug 3 17:06:44 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 4-Aug-87 05:29:07 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: Institute of Cognitive Studies, UC Berkeley Lines: 70 Summary: A tale of three magazines Here's something you may find of interest: --------------------- Today, while reading the latest issue of the "Robo City News" I became very confused. In the table of contents I was given credit for co-authoring an article. As far as I knew, I had not written an article for that issue! Now, I'm used to people stripping my name from things and selling them, but this appeared to be a new twist. I have written for RCN twice in the past, and the September issue is scheduled to contain another article. But *not* June/July! What appeared under my name was actually a USENET posting from a few months back. Since I don't restrict my postings, it's quite alright for them to take it. Unfortunately they did a really lousy job of typesetting it, including cutting off half of a paragraph. Worse yet the writing of the original posting was not of the "highest quality" (my fault, primarily :-). All in all I wish that they had warned me ahead of time, at least so I could fondle the PageSetter file a bit to look nice, correct some errors, and remove some outdated information. So watch out USENET posters... you may become magazine authors before you know it! ------------------------- And if you ever write for "AmigaWorld", watch out for the technical content of your article! Their non-technical editors saw fit to change my file names (in such a manner as to cause the example to fail). They also re-wrote a paragraph to read "Since you never know exactly where your program will reside in memory, you also need an offset that reflects the location of your task when it is loaded. This is the purpose of the xref [_LVOOpenLibrary].". ----==| Wrong! |==---- Thank your favorite deity for author's proofs! Oh, well, at least it sort of resembles what I sent them. Sort of. And, a positive point, they got the program listing correct. Looks like they did it from disk, rather than typing it in! --------------------- "The Transactor" was best of all... they published my article verbatim, including the little joke I put in for the editor's amusement about "the new Transactor Amiga disk". It didn't exist then, it had never been announced, and I don't think it exists now. Transactor also set type directly from disk instead of typing it in. A minor glitch reversed } and {, but otherwise it worked fine. Gone are the days of magazines like Compute! where you had to wait two months for the typesetting bug fixes before using the listing! --------------------- As for lead times, AmigaWorld has taken about 8 months, Transactor about 3-4 months. The Robo City News deadline is as late as the 20th of the previous month (about 10 days to print!!!!). Robo City really benefits from "Desk Top Publishing" and articles already in that format. Of course, the captive print shop (Shores Press, ?Los Gatos?) does not hurt. (Shores Press also offers "walk up to an Amiga" typesetting.) |\ /| . Ack! (NAK, EOT, SOH) {o O} . ( " ) bryce@cogsci.berkeley.EDU -or- ucbvax!cogsci!bryce U "When it's you against the world, back the world."