CYBER NOTES

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SCIENCE PUBS REJECT ARTICLES WRITTEN IN WORD 2007

ROB WEIR BLOG - It appears that Science, the journal of the America
Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest
scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to
include advice for Office 2007 users. The news is not good.

"Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that
are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around
previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any
files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007,
either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of
Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or
Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file)
before submitting to Science."

Well, so much for 100% compatibility, eh? . . . More bad news:

"Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the
default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be
unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format
compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion
will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of
equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word
2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not
designed to be compatible with MathML. Regrettably, we will be forced to
return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default
equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please
use the Math Type equation editor or the equation editor included in
previous versions of Microsoft Word."

Nature appears to have the same problem:

"We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007
formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters)
cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and
typesetting programs."

Reuse of existing standards is important. When you reuse a standard, you
are reusing more than a piece of paper. You are reusing the experience
and effort that went into creating and reviewing that standard. You are
reusing the experience gathered by those who have already implemented
the standard. You are reusing the books and training materials already
written for that standard. You are reusing the interfaces for other
technologies that have already integrated with that standard or can
produce or consume output that conforms to that standard. . .

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/04/math-markup-marked-down.html

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