Re Is it a M$ world?

[Jo Beverley jobev@xxxxxxxx]

You edit a newsletter for copy editors? Can you get a message out to whoever it
is keeps putting semicolons in novels written in natural narrative voice?
Especially annoying when she/he does it in dialogue. People don't speak in
complete, grammatical sentences all the time. In the writing community, we're
convinced it's one person who goes from place to place.

Sorry, you hit a button.

> How do the rest of us, especially those in publishing, feel about this?

I think people definitely need to accept that Word isn't the whole universe.
There's just been a long discussion on a novelists list about the problems
transfering mss into Word for publishers. Many are now using author files as
the beginning of the typesetting process, and some like to receive the work
electronically rather than in hard copy. I reckon they should deal with
discrepancies, but many authors use WP and are spinning in fits over it.

It's created a problem for me, of course, but I deal with it. I copy my XyWrite
file over in reveal mode -- whatever it is where it has the MDUL etc visible.
Then I search and replace. That's my only real translation problem --
underlining for italics. For the rest, I just insert paragraph indents in Word
then do my final editing read through in Word to catch any problems.

My editor prints it out in Word for copy editing, so I get that back and it
always has a few empty lines for some reason. But that's easily dealt with by
the copy editor.

Mind you, I'm not sure the publishers are any keener on Word than we are. If
pinned down, they'd probably say they're using it because most of their authors
use it. My editor, who's quite tech-savvy (unusual in the biz) knows less than
me about how it works, and that's saying something.

Jo