Yeah I *know* all about the academic geeks who swear up and down by Tex
and all of its variants--that's because they're all still hooked up to
VAXes and AS-400s. Publishing houses live in the stone age and are all
all defiantly proud of their oafish gentility. That's why they just keep
going out of business. I hear there are still people that use Mosaic as
their browser. At most publishing houses that wouldn't even raise a
ripple of amusement because 90% of them wouldn't get the joke.

Notwithstanding all of that there are plenty of  sophisticated front
ends  that talk to Scitex backends that rarely if ever require
intermedaite intervention. Even five years ago maybe, but not now. But
the kind of project you're talking about never gets done because this
kind of controversy abouty what is basically outmoded esoterica always
erupts more towards the beginning than even halfway to anywhere.

GAVIN

Tim Bray wrote:

> At 03:26 AM 26/09/01 -0700, Gavin Francis wrote:
> > And people who still use Tex are still blockheads.
>
> Actually, they're people who need to do serious math typesetting.
> Quite a lot of them are Ph.D.'s.  And indeed, lots of Ph.D.'s
> who have to typeset mathematics are blockheads, but not notably
> more than any other segment of the population I would have
> thought.  With TeX you could get the computer output that
> looked *just like* the New Directions books.
>
> A few years back I did some consulting for Springer-Verlag, the
> big German technical publisher who are dominant in some areas
> of physics and math.  They had a group of 10 people who did
> nothing but build TeX macros to meet their special needs.  I
> thought it would be most appropriate if this group wore cowls
> and woke before dawn to hear the litany on bended knee on cold
> stone, but they turned out to be quite ordinary people. -Tim