Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
This is kind of funny since the argument for LaTeX in academic works is that you want to focus on the content and if you use more primitive tools like Word you will spend more time on non-content tasks such as formatting or getting the paper consistent.
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Well, many scholars in the humanities and social sciences do not use LaTeX. I think those in the sciences and engineering often do and the harder sciences in the social sciences do.
For those of us scholars who mainly deal with textual material, Word is what is most often used. As an anthropologist, I don't need to worry about illustrations, equations, tables and so forth generally. It's text, text, text all the way. And then endnotes.
I think the publisher has a lot more work to do in this case because they'll be the ones doing the formatting. As I understand in the sciences, when you submit a journal article, everything must be properly formatted and so forth. Not the case for us cultural anthropologists. We only need to worry about having the text there (aside from simple things like paragraph indentations), correct endnotes, and of course correction citation format. After that, it's the publisher who worries about the formatting.
By the way, this also goes to show that there isn't just one monolithic publishing industry. Even within the publish industry itself, there are different conventions. In the sciences the rules for journal article submission are different than in the humanities and the social sciences etc.