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I think point #2 is only true for LaTeX-heavy fields like math, physics, and statistics. It's certainly not true for biology, medicine, psychology, or other fie
by capnrefsmmat 11y ago
I think point #2 is only true for LaTeX-heavy fields like math, physics, and statistics. It's certainly not true for biology, medicine, psychology, or other fields where Word is king.
In biology and medicine, NIH open-access requirements mean most articles are converted to XML (http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/ http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/). Articles are submitted in Word files, edited and converted to XML via some proprietary complicated toolchain, typeset to PDF with a big proprietary system like Arbortext, and shipped off to PubMed for archiving. Figures are usually TIFFs or PDFs converted to whatever formats are needed for the web or print.
I don't know how the conversion process works, but I suspect that turning arbitrary Word files into semantic XML with accurate bibliographic cross-referencing metadata and high-quality tables and figures requires a lot of manual work. You have to deal with complicated tables, weird Word formatting, and whatever weird styling the authors think is a good idea. The bibliography has to be annotated with DOIs and converted to a standard format.
LaTeX and BibTeX, or some other structured markup language, are undoubtedly much easier to deal with and much easier to automate.
I think Michael Eisen of PLOS has commented on the situation and said they're actively working on rebuilding their publishing toolchain to automate more of the process, since it requires hours of work for every paper.
- pgtan 11y agoAutomatic typography isn't! Let's suppose for example, there is $P_A$ in the text. According to the rules of math typesetting if A stays for description like "Alice", it should be set in the current math roman font i.e. $P_\text{A}$. So $P_A$ looks suspicious, what shall the typesetter do? 1. ignore everything and this way leave the typographic responsibility to the author; 2. set it correctly, because she is one of those underpaid TeX-typesetter, who can read out of the text, what A stands for; 3. send back a question to the author for clarifying. And this is just a simple example. The before/after gap betweeen author typoscripts an proper typesetted books is enormous. Sadly, the job of the scientific typesetter is not valued this days any more.
- gradstudent 11y agoThe job of the scientific typesetter should not exist. Give me your reviews and your latex template (and only your latex template) and get out of the way.
- Fomite 11y agoThis. I find all over the place that the LaTeX-heavy fields assume everyone uses it for everything. This is definitely not the case - if I had to guess, a minority of papers overall are written in LaTeX. And while easier to automate, I'll take a manuscript laid out by a professional any day of the week.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago"I'll take a manuscript laid out by a professional any day of the week." LaTeX with a good template looks much better than some of the "professional" work I've seen. Also: the real question here is whether the "professional" layout adds enough scholarly value to make it worth paying the outrageous journal subscription price. Journals are not intended to be aesthetic experiences. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to disseminate knowledge. High prices are counterproductive to that goal.
- Fomite 11y agoThe dissemination of information is partially an aesthetic experience.
- Maken 11y agoThat sounds like an awful process prone to "lost in conversion" errors.