Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
They should be using a free tool, such as TeX. Then they would at least have the actual text content in a text-only format, quite easy to retrieve. Also they would reduce production costs, as they wouldn't have to pay for software licenses and upgrades...
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Also I do like (La)TeX very much, I can understand why most publishers like to use other software for fictional work.
But in either case - every DP software I know has some way of exporting the content (either directly or indirectly e.g. via html) to nearly every e-book-format including, but not limited to, PDF and ePub ...
On of the problems is, that some publishers apparently are not using digital archives, but paper one - printing the book and keeping the book, not the files. Others dont even go through the hazzle of creating "one source-file" but manually stuff together the printing templates.
So - there really is not "one nice file" that can be exported - so it would be much more useful. But OTOH it would be useful for developers to use automatic testing, document their source code, etc - and just have a look how many are doing this (hint: Not many), so it seems to be a common problem that "sensible" and "frequently used" are two completely different subjects...