Several days ago I decided to read some old articles about TeX and check if they are still useful. This post continues this by comparing facts described in another article from the first TUGboat issue with my experiences with modern TeX software.
Ellen Swanson described the general way in which book and journals are prepared, from ideas of their authors to binding, and how TeX makes it cheaper. The article states that typesetting one page took about 1.5 hour before using TeX, in the same TUGboat issue Richard Palais wrote that this takes several seconds for TeX (now it is clearly faster). When the author typesets the paper using TeX much greater savings can be made.
Now these arguments still look valid, but several improvements were made to the TeX using method and new non-TeX systems were designed. Today savings with TeX should be even greater, since:
- TeX82 is better then TeX78
- new macro packages (e.g. LaTeX or ConTeXt) make writing papers easier, also support more logical formatting allowing using journal-specific styles in a general way
- MakeIndex and BibTeX (or their replacements) make non-creative part of making indexes and bibliographies completely automated, journals may make their own styles of these without any changes to the source of the paper
- instead of on a ‘magnetic tape’ the paper source could be send to the publisher by the Internet
- diff(1) and patch(1) or a version control system could be used to transfer changes made during e.g. editing
- there are much more materials for learning TeX (or LaTeX/ConTeXt) then in 1980
Now the biggest competition to this method of publishing are the WYSIWYG word processing programs. In my opinion the following disadvantages make their use more costly than the above method:
- many of them are non-free are require expensive licenses
- they are WYSIWYG and may not be automated to the same extend as TeX, requiring more work by humans
- their data formats make it more difficult to compare different versions of a paper
- they either do not support logical markup or their users rarely know how to do it, making journal-specific styling more difficult
- their output depends on the computer used, so both author and publisher will optimize line or page breaks
- producing high quality output may be more difficult or impossible
So journals typeset with TeX should be cheaper, allowing better funding for really useful work like editing or high quality printing. It is best when all papers are typeset with TeX by the authors, but it is also beneficial if only some are and the rest is written with word processors and typeset in TeX by the publisher.
