O'Reilly book production (was Re: Wine applicability)

[Mats Wichmann]

On Fri, 28 Dec 2001 19:38:12 GMT, root at 127.0.0.1 ((Five Fresh) Fish)
wrote:

:On 28 Dec 2001 09:41:30 -0800, aahz at panix.com (Aahz Maruch) wrote:
:
:>In article <a0i8qg014dn at enews2.newsguy.com>,
:>Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote:
:>>"Cameron Laird" <claird at starbase.neosoft.com> wrote in message
:>>news:200112281642.KAA24897 at starbase.neosoft.com...
:>>>Alex: 
:>>>>
:>>>>that's my primary need -- Word with O'Reilly customized macros &c,
:>>>>as that's what I'm required to use for one of the books.  So, I
:>>>
:>>> O'REILLY MAKES YOU USE WORD MACROS?!??!!?
:>>> I've got to talk with those boys.  That strikes me as an atrocity.
:>>
:>>"makes" is probably an overbid.  The Cookbook I'm doing in XML with a
:>>custom DTD, and that's just fine - I get to use VIM:-).  But for the
:>>Nutshell, that wasn't an option.
:>
:>Really?  May you explain why?  (I'm still hoping to do a book with
:>O'Reilly and I *really* don't want to use Word.)
: 
:Especially when WordPerfect supports SGML/XML.  And supports long documents
:far more readily than Word does.
: 
:Silly, really.  O'Reilly should use the best software for the task, not the
:most popular.

That's actually the choice they've made:  they use FrameMaker for the
production, which is far from "the most popular".  Like a number of
other shops (I know this is true for Manning), they let their authors
prepare their manuscript in something that can be converted to, or
imported into, Frame.  Wouldn't be helpful to force everyone to learn
Frame if they're already comfortable in something else.

Mats Wichmann