From: Tom Terry <tom@TOMTERRY.COM> >It seems that most editors and publishers request that >from articles to manuscripts be sent in MS Word format. >I am curious how professional writers using Nisus Writer >get around this requirement. In my experience as a professional freelance editor, it's not "most editors and publishers" who want MS Word files -- just most of the people who don't know anything about non-Microsoft software or are set up to send styled Word files to their DTP people and let them deal with any resulting problems. Quite a lot of publishers actually use WordPerfect, which tends to handle books better: to Word, anything over 50 pages is a "long document" and it's really designed to suit corporate documentation systems rather than books and journal publishers. Almost all "tech writers" (hardware, software, telecommunications, etc.) use Word as a matter of course, but technical writers in science and engineering are just as likely to be familiar with SGML or TeX tools for transmitting format information in plain text. The advantage is that the files are smaller, virtually crash-proof, guaranteed virus-free, and importable into ANY software one happens to use for production. Most environments where editing is done by a team and it's important to track who made which changes when use Word whose recent versions have a "track changes" feature that apparently works well. If you are being asked to do this, you have no choice. Where changes are not being tracked, all that matters is producing a file which will be *openable* in Word if that's what the recipient has asked for and which can contain such formatting information as an author is expected to provide. Many publishers (including university presses) specifically *prohibit* authors from supplying anything but plain text set up in Courier 12 with 1" margins, with a single return between paragraphs and double returns to set off headings -- because authors almost invariably mess things up when they try to do DTP in their wordprocessors and it takes an editor hours to "clean up" the files. (Some editors, myself included, believe authors have been far less careful about the content of their work since they started "making it look good" by playing with fancy fonts.) The bad news for you, if your publisher is specifically asking you for fully-formatted Word files, is that you really can't provide them from Nisus unless the documents themselves are very simple and straightforward. The two programs work completely differently and there is no 100%-effective filter because M$ wants everyone to be forced to buy their products. If what you must provide is more basic (without an index, table of contents, or elaborate layout), you can get away with exporting an RTF or HTML file from within Nisus ... but I'm afraid you will still want to check the results by opening the files in Word 5.1 because weird things can happen --I've had files where the RTF comes up with the right margin reset next to the left one, and twice the converted files were incomplete. Once you've got to do that, you might as well resave the file as Word 5.1 format, which should pose no problems for the recipient. If your publisher will be returning Word files after editing, you will need to download the Word 97-98-2000 filter from the Microsoft site, which enables Word 5.1 to open files in the later formats ... most of the time, and without accommodating the more recent features. Then, saving as RTF will give you a file you can work on in Nisus. If you have a look at the list archives, you'll see this topic is a recurrent one and most of us Nisoids wish there were an easier way for NW and Word to exchange files. HTH, Judyth &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Judyth Mermelstein "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito ..." Montreal, QC <espresso@e-scape.net> &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
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