Technical publishers tend to be much friendlier to alternatives. I delivered my book in OpenOffice format, generated from DocBook XML (translated from DocBook S

Technical publishers tend to be much friendlier to alternatives. I delivered my book in OpenOffice format, generated from DocBook XML (translated from DocBook SGML midway through the writing process), to my publisher, and they were comfortable with it and had versions of their templates and such for it, and that was ~14 years ago. I would hope it has improved even more since then. And, I'm glad to hear Word has gotten cheaper. Didn't you used to need to buy the whole Office suite to get it, and wasn't it like $250? I genuinely don't know. The last version of Office I bought was much more than a decade ago. Oh, nevermind. I checked. It's sold as a subscription. Costs $99.99/year, so it is much more expensive than it used to be, it's just spread over several years. It used to be reasonable to keep the same Office version for 5+ years.