Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:36 +0000 3/3/14, Harding, Dan wrote:

>Anything proprietary, that requires a major learning curve, or an additional software purchase/install would not work well at all.

With all respect to Rebecca, in that case I would be very cautious about LaTeX. Yes, it's free, and yes, it works, but if you want to deviate from the designs dictated by existing packages (correct term?), you are then into a very big learning issue, requiring deep knowledge of TeX itself. LaTeX can be made to do amazing things in the hands of an expert, but I've yet to see a predefined package produce acceptable results: there's always some wrinkle the package developer hasn't thought of, and which you can't fix.

As a small example, I recently copy-edited a thesis done in LaTeX. The package designer had never considered that an author might want to embed non-proportional character markup, which is very common in software documentation, where camel-case is a convention, i.e. 'ThisIsaThing'. Such words are almost always non-dictionary words. In this case, if such a word fell at the right-hand margin of the text page, LaTeX simply didn't bother to try to hyphenate it, resulting in gross margin violation and the author having to manually break such words *in the LaTeX source*. Of course, any editing that resulted in text flow destroyed this, with the manually hyphenated word now appearing hyphenated within a line. Yech.

-- 
Steve