[Journal] Finally an Update on Volume 6

[Micha Silver]

I have just a few responses, more or less echoing what's already been said:
1- Latex is certainly the way to insure a uniform a professional looking 
document.
2- I don't think we'll see contributors submitting articles in latex. In 
many cases journal authors are administrators or GIS users, without the 
need or desire to do document formating for publishing.
3- Having said that, the conclusion is that the latex "elephant" is 
probably going to be with us for a long time.
4- Since ODF and Word formats are what contributors are sending in, it 
might be helpful to make up ODF and Word templates for articles to be 
submitted. This might ease the latex transition for us.  Furthermore, we 
should not accept pdf since the conversion it tricky and error-prone.
and finally:
5- I'm still having trouble seeing the advantage to the OJS system...

Regards,
Micha

Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
> Sorry guys, I've been heads-down on IRS paperwork, then took yesterday
> off.  Just a brief note, if latex is getting in the way, then we aren't
> doing all we can to make it easy for the contributors.  Getting plain
> text or even .doc files into a .tex file is pretty simple.  I apologise
> Landon, since I haven't had the time to help coach you on the latex side
> of things - I've used it now for 5 huge issues of the journal and it's
> worked very well, making compilation of a volume quite efficient.
>
> I cannot possibly imagine handling 60+ pages in a scribus format, one
> page at a time, it's bad enough when I have to do it in openoffice.
> Keep in mind we are not doing a ton of 'layout' work, which scribus and
> other desktop apps are aimed at.  I'm convinced we could even capture
> 99% of the info from authors just be having them save info in a web
> form, then have latex process it immediately - that's the flexibility we
> get.  If it's not scriptable, then it's a huge burden for us to compile,
> I'm quite convinced of that.
>
> Now that I'm done my main IRS stuff, and before I jump into the next
> patch of paperwork I have to submit, I will help wrap up this journal.
> I never intended for you to have to wrangle at this depth with me on the
> sidelines :)
>
> And lastly, I know OJS has been a learning curve, but I'm hopeful we can
> stick with it and gain competency around it.  The problem with most of
> us is that we are geeks and always see how things could be 'done better'
> and we don't like wasting our time.  Again, sorry I've been absent, but
> I think we can continue to streamline things and grow together to make
> this a snap.
>
> Oh yeah.. I have an annual report to pull together too.  More on that
> after the weekend...
>
> Thanks so much for your help on all this guys!
>
> Barry Rowlingson wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 8:22 PM, Sunburned Surveyor
>> <sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> The big elephant in the room is the remaining LaTex work. Barry has
>>> been carrying most of the load in this area. (Thanks Barry!) I'm
>>> afriad my limited LaTex knowledge means I won't be much help, beyond
>>> converting the news section to LaTex format.
>>>
>>> I sent Tyler some ideas about publishing the Journal directly to HTML
>>> online, and/or putting together the PDF copies of the articles in
>>> Scribus. I know we've got some hard core LaTex fans, but I think we
>>> might be able to spread the actual publication process among more
>>> volunteers if we use something more user friendly. I'm waiting for
>>> Tyler to comment. Maybe we don't do that for this volume, but try it
>>> on the next. I'd volunteer to putting together HTML/ Scribus files in
>>> parallel with the LaTex process for the next Journal volume, so at
>>> least we could see if an alternative publication process works better.
>>>
>>> At any rate, I'm going to be looking for help to get the final LaTex
>>> based PDF files for Volume 6 out the door. Maybe I am too optimistic,
>>> but I hope we can get this done by the end of March. Do we think this
>>> is possible?
>>>       
>>  [dons his LaTeX ninja uniform]
>>
>>  I'm not totally busy up to March 31st so I can fairly rapidly deal
>> with arising LaTeX issues.
>>
>>  Here's some thoughts on document preparation in general. Prefix all
>> this with "IMHO":
>>
>>  Firstly, if you want it to look drop-dead gorgeous, then you have to
>> use LaTeX *at some point*. It does *everything*. I never want to see
>> another ugly MS Office equation, or bad hyphenation, or incorrect
>> cross-reference again. It's doing what commercial software costing in
>> the TENS of thousands [US/CDN $, £] does for newspapers and magazines.
>>
>> However, LaTeX is clearly only really useful for print and PDF final
>> outputs. There's no reason that all inputs and submissions need to be
>> given in LaTeX, nor that all final outputs must derive from it. It
>> just has to be easy to make the required output set from the allowed
>> input set.
>>
>>  It may be that article submission in other formatted text systems
>> should be encouraged - such as ReStructured Text
>> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText] or Sisu
>> [http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/] or DocBook
>> [http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookTutorials] (although nobody
>> should really be writing articles in XML, it may be useful as an
>> intermediate format).
>>
>>  What I would really like to build is a way for authors to check their
>> documents conform to what is needed for the journal, which means, for
>> example, providing a LaTeX master document they can plug their article
>> in to to see how it comes out. Not sure how this works for .doc or
>> OO.org submissions though. My real answer is 'use LaTeX'. Otherwise we
>> just convert by hand as ever...
>>
>>  *kapow* ninja smoke bomb!
>>
>> Barry
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>>     
>
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-- 
Micha Silver
Arava Development Co. +972-52-3665918
http://surfaces.co.il