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I know many academic publishers provide a style file for authors who wish to prepare their journal manuscripts using (La)TeX. I think it's safe to assume, however, that the majority of submitted manuscripts are prepared using MS Word. As a result, a considerable effort must have gone into streamlining the Word-based workflow. From the publisher's standpoint, is one format easier to get into final form?

Joseph Wright
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erik
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    why is it safe to assume that? It depends entirely on the subject area, not all math journals accept word at all. – David Carlisle Feb 10 '15 at 21:48
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    I'm not sure we are placed well to answer this. While some people may have some insight into this, it's not really within the area of TeX per se: it's about publishing workflows. Moreover, as already noted, it's heavily subject dependent. – Joseph Wright Feb 10 '15 at 21:50
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    as already pointed out, this is highly subject dependent. the ams requires all its publications to be processable with latex, and if they are submitted in some other form, they are converted (if possible) or rekeyed. – barbara beeton Feb 10 '15 at 21:55
  • Of course it is subject-dependent, but many publishers cover a wide range of subjects. I'm hoping for some insight from that perspective (thanks @barbarabeeton) – erik Feb 10 '15 at 21:58
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    @erik Yes, but it's not a TeX question: as noted several times, many big publishers use commercial back-ends for their journal work which don't use TeX. (Books are a separate case.) Also, if you want a straw-poll of what they prefer I guess I'd look at instructions to authors. For example, Nature and Science are not keen on TeX, the chemistry publishers I know are not massively keen, as already noted maths publishers are likely to take a different line, etc. – Joseph Wright Feb 10 '15 at 22:07

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As noted by @David Carlisle and @Joseph Wright, the answer to this question is heavily dependent on subject area, as well as particular publishers and the approach they take to typesetting. I can answer this question, but only in relation to academic humanities (literature and religion).

Yes, there are significant features in place for Word-based workflow—at some publishers. HarperCollins, for instance, makes Word documents digi-ready in preparation for typesetting. Academic publishers in the humanities (that I've had experience with) use a similar method of "tagging" .doc files so they play nice with their typesetting solutions. But each publisher I've worked with used slightly different method. The key similarity across all the publishers I've worked with, though (Ashgate, HarperCollins, Wipf&Stock, and various religion/philosophy/theology journals) has been a clear preference for Word documents. A real shame, since I've ended up spending quite a lot of time turning beautiful LaTeX documents into .doc(x) format for just about everything I've had published.

I know it's different for non-humanities fields, though, and I'm not able to speak to that.

Source: extensive experience with the publishing world, both as an editorial services provider and as an occasional author.

Daniel Marrs
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