Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Raymond Wan writes:
>  > I think for biological journals, accepted manuscripts are copy edited
>  > prior to publication.
> I think this is true for high-quality journals in general, although in
> my experience most typos are caught by the referees.


Yes...though I think referees are busy enough to check the quality of
the research to do spell-checking, too.  I realize many authors are
not native English speakers but running it through a spell checker
leaves a much better impression.  Reviewers are human after all...


>  > you have to check it very carefully as silly typos do appear.
>
> Especially in Japan. :-(  I can understand why Japanese don't try to
> use spell-checkers for Japanese -- most "typos" are induced by bogus
> henkan to valid word, and even misentry of the kana is likely to
> result in a valid word.  Grammar checkers catch more of the okurigana
> errors.  But why they don't use spell checkers for English I don't
> get.


Though grammar checkers are imperfect and sometimes give wrong advice,
they can catch many of the mistakes I've seen.


>  > What I wonder is what do the copy editors use?  They take the
>  > Microsoft Word file and use what?
>
> Microsoft Word.  What else would they use?  This is the main reason
> for specifying a submission format.  Some may print out and use red
> ink, of course.
>
>
>  > Why not ask authors to use that program to produce something that
>  > is near final so there is less work for the copy editors (and less
>  > of a chance of making mistakes)?
>
> I don't understand what you're suggesting here.  The high-quality
> typesetting systems accept Word documents and the like directly,
> AFAIK.  This may require some kind of custom translation software, but
> that's cheap compared to the cost of human reviewers, editors, and
> copy-editors.


Maybe it's just me...but I've seen documents come back from
copy-editors after the manuscript has been accepted and there are
heaps of mistakes.  Not with difficult parts like math formulas but
even words in paragraphs.  The numbers resembled the type of mistakes
that one would see with OCR devices.  For example, a word that is
spelled correctly in the original but is spelled wrong from the copy
editor.

Perhaps it was just one or two isolated incidents...not sure.  But it
didn't feel like they were using file conversion.  *ha*  Honestly, I
thought they were re-typing it in; copy and pasting from one window to
another isn't even that bad!

Ray