Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > I think for biological journals, accepted manuscripts are copy edited
 > prior to publication.

I think this is true for high-quality journals in general, although in
my experience most typos are caught by the referees.

 > you have to check it very carefully as silly typos do appear.

Especially in Japan. :-(  I can understand why Japanese don't try to
use spell-checkers for Japanese -- most "typos" are induced by bogus
henkan to valid word, and even misentry of the kana is likely to
result in a valid word.  Grammar checkers catch more of the okurigana
errors.  But why they don't use spell checkers for English I don't
get.

 > What I wonder is what do the copy editors use?  They take the
 > Microsoft Word file and use what?

Microsoft Word.  What else would they use?  This is the main reason
for specifying a submission format.  Some may print out and use red
ink, of course.


 > Why not ask authors to use that program to produce something that
 > is near final so there is less work for the copy editors (and less
 > of a chance of making mistakes)?

I don't understand what you're suggesting here.  The high-quality
typesetting systems accept Word documents and the like directly,
AFAIK.  This may require some kind of custom translation software, but
that's cheap compared to the cost of human reviewers, editors, and
copy-editors.