Electronic Editing

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

When one is editing an MS on the computer, as opposed to the traditional
way of marking up a paper copy, one needs various functions not commonly
used in word processing. To make a word processor a suitable medium for
such editing, various "additions" (macros, templates, XPL programs in the
case of XyW) need to be created. Leslie did a very nice set for XyW for
CUP. For example, we Used Styles to spec the various parts of the MS
(1st-, 2d-, 3d-level heads, block quotes, epigraphs, etc.), then when we
were all finished editing ran a macro that converted (or possibly copied;
I forget) the US tags to visible tags that printed out in the left
margin, telling the author and the typesetter what the element was. My
point was that it was possible to create these add-ons in-house for XyW;
for Word, one had to bring in 3d-party experts who knew things BG doesn't
want Word end-users to know.
	Actually, of course, no word processor, no matter how tweaked, is really
satisfactory when one has to do a heavy copy edit. The results are nearly
always illegible (to be brutally honest, they often are on paper too;
dirty little publishing industry secret). XyW comes closest, and lets one
do absolutely necessary things (like cleaning out the 600 changes of font
I found in my current project) that are impossible or take forever in WP
or Word. But, for example, if you turn on Redlining, anything you move
("transpose" in copy editing jargon) is marked as deleted where you take
it from, and inserted where you put it. You then have to include a Label
telling the author that is was moved (I'm thinking of possible ways to
automate this). And once you start redlining, spell check goes out the
window, since you have deleted and inserted letters in the middle of
words, so spell check doesn't recognize them. (On the other hand, XyW's
spell to a file gives you the beginnings of your style sheet--a list of
all unusual or otherwise problematic words in the MS and how they're
being treated--and helps you catch people's names spelled three different
ways. Nothing like that in WP or Word.)
	To sum up: no word processor is really an effective tool for online
editing, but XyW comes closest and is absolutely necessary; WP at least
lets you see what you're doing, but is a goshawful kludge; and Word
stinks on ice. The catch is the wretched conversion filters, which are
particularly bad when converting to Word 2000 (which apparently cannot
accurately read files created in its own older incarnations). You get all
the formatting garbage cleaned out in XyW (publishers want simply
formatted files, but authors, whether out of ignorance or a desire to be
fancy, I don't know, always overformat), then it comes back in when you
convert back to WP or Word.
	Has anyone any experience of Quark's Copy Desk? Someone at the function
I was at was using it, but I didn't get a chance to pick her brains.
Patricia