TUGboat, Volume 0 (9999), No. 0 1001

The incredible tale of the author who

didn’t want to do the publisher’s job, but

eventually had to because the publisher

didn’t have a clue about typesetting,

although to be honest, the author did

some stupid things as well, but fortunately,

everything is all right now, however this

is an experience the author wouldn’t wish

upon anyone, but is still going to narrate it

for your greatest enjoyment, and will do so

both crying and laughing

(yes, that was the

title)

Didier Verna

Abstract

In this article, I relate a recent experience of mine:

writing a book chapter for a publisher who doesn’t

have a clue about typesetting. I confess my futile

attempt at using T

X for writing the chapter in

question. I describe the hell that descended upon me

for daring to do that. I however admit that the hell

in question would have been even greater, had I not

done so. This article is both a nervous breakdown

and a peal of laughter, and I am seeking for the

reader’s comfort.

1 Prologue

The story began on May 07, 2011, when I received

an invitation to author a chapter for a particular

Computer Science book. Here is an excerpt from the

email I received:

The objective of the book is to provide origi-

nal academic work about current research . . .

a comprehensive overview . . . comprehensive

material . . . provide new results and answers

to some open problems . . . indispensable for

researchers, professionals and practitioners as

well as for educators who would like to have

a comprehensive . . . , useful resource for grad-

uate and undergraduate level courses.

Well, a book containing practically everything,

and targeted at practically everyone. That sounded

like quite a challenge, and I decided to accept it. I

sent a proposal on June 14.

On July 20, I received an email informing me

of the acceptance of my proposal. The message

contained a URL pointing to a chapter template, and

two attachments with some “chapter organization

and formatting guidelines” and some “details to keep

in mind”. All of this sounded ﬁne, but my ears were

already starting to tickle me: why a chapter template,

why guidelines, why in two diﬀerent attachments?

Don’t they provide a style or a class ﬁle?

I looked more closely, and that is when I discov-

ered that the provided chapter template was in fact

a Word document, and that the two attachments

were in docx format.



Then, I started to worry.

On top of that, I had several questions that were

not answered in the documents I received, so I asked

them by email to the editor (my only contact then)

on July 21. What about copyright assignment? Do I

get a contract of some sort? How is the book going to

be published: online, on paper? Will it be available

for sale or for free? With an open source license? Do

I get royalties on the sales . . . etc. The next day, I

got the following response.

My responsibility is out of scope of publishing.

At this point I don’t have the answers to your

questions. I need to contact the publisher.

Well, thank you very much, because you see, these

are important issues nevertheless . . .

2 Submission

After thinking about it for some (very short) time, I

decided to be clever. I sent my initial submission on

October 4, in PDF format. I explained to the editor

that I had written the chapter in L

X because there

was no way I could work with Word. I also promised

that I would convert it to Word for the ﬁnal version,

in order to comply with the publisher’s requirements.

The editor had no problem with that, and then

followed a reviewing period (contents only!) until the

ﬁnal acceptance of the chapter (contents only!) on

March 10, 2012.

Let’s be clever? Not so much . . . In terms of

PDF to Word conversion, I had spotted at least a

dozen websites oﬀering this service for free before,

so I thought it was going to be easy. That’s why, in

all my self-suﬃciency, I waited until the last minute

before taking care of that. First, I had some minor

adjustments to do.

Unnumbered sections

No, the publisher doesn’t

want section numbers. Don’t ask. Easy enough to

do in L

X, though. One just needs to use starred

sectioning commands. Oh, but on second thought,

what happens to all those nicely

varioref

-formatted

section references? Gone is the answer, I think. So I

had to get rid of those, and ﬁnd a textual workaround

to point the reader to other parts of the chapter,

without numbers. Very convenient indeed. Dammit.

No ﬁgures (go ﬁgure)

Yes, the publisher wants

the ﬁgures in a separate zip ﬁle, not in the chapter

itself. Don’t ask. Surely, they have implemented

The incredible tale of the author who didn’t want to do the publisher’s job, etc.

1002 TUGboat, Volume 0 (9999), No. 0

Calcagno, C., Taha, W., Huang, L.,

and

Leroy, X. (2003).

Calcagno, C., Taha, W., Huang, L.,

Leroy, X. (2003).

Manipulation (PEPM), pages 95- 99. ACM SGPLAN.

Manipulation (PEPM) (pp. 95-99). ACM SGPLAN.

Symbolic Computation, 13(1-2):51-55.

Symbolic Computation, 13(1-2), 51-55.

Figure 1: Bibliographic format divergences

unzip

and T

X’s ﬂoat placement algorithm with

Word macros. Anyway, easy to do in my L

source ﬁle, but then again, I had to rewrite all the

ﬁgure references manually.

So I eventually recompiled my PDF with those

adjustments, and started using a PDF to Word con-

version service. At the last minute (did I say so,

already?).



At that moment, all hell descended upon me.

Big mistake #1

The conversion didn’t work very

well, and that is a euphemism. Basically, the font size

was ok, and everything else was lost: font families,

shapes, verbatim and code formatting. Everything.

And because I did that at the last minute (did I say

so, already?), I decided that it would be safer for me

to spend the last night restoring all that was lost by

hand directly in Word, rather than trying to look

for yet another half-baked service in the naïve hope

that it would work better. So I took my little mouse

with me and went through all 30 pages, clicking like

crazy. Welcome to the world of WYSIWYG.

Here, I must confess that in the heat of the mo-

ment, another simpler and totally obvious alternative

didn’t even occur to me. Months later (in fact, when

I was preparing the slides for TUG 2013), I realized

that I could have opened the PDF ﬁle resulting from

the L

X compilation, selected the whole contents,

and just cut and pasted it into Word. I tried that

and it actually went better than any of the online

conversion services I tried. Shame on me . . .

Big mistake #2 The second big mistake I made

was to not use the exact bibliographic style the pub-

lisher wanted. More precisely, the author instructions

mentioned “strict APA” conformance, and I simply

used

apalike

. In the end, there were subtle diﬀer-

ences in the formatted bibliographic output, some of

them illustrated in ﬁgure 1. I also had some errors

in the

.bib

ﬁles which led to incorrect sorting and

other oddities.

Here, the obvious choice would have been to go

ﬁx the

.bst

ﬁle in order to produce the desired out-

put, and regenerate the PDF. But do you remember

that I had already spent hours ﬁxing Big mistake

#1 in Word? I simply couldn’t bear the very idea

of having done so for nothing, so I decided to go ﬁx

all those details by hand, in the Word document.

3 Interlude

I am a Boduka. I practice martial techniques in order

to reach ultimate self-control, peace and harmony

with the Universe. Let’s breathe. Deeply. Okay.

In the meantime, I had my ﬁrst contact with

people from the publishing company (remember that

until now, my only contact was with the book editor).

On August 28, I received an email from the publisher,

part of which is transcribed below.

From: marketeer #1

Greetings! . . . personally thank you for your

excellent contribution! [lots of marketing crap]

Your development editor, marketeer #2, very

much enjoyed working with you, and now as

your marketing representative, I look forward

to assisting you with your promotional eﬀorts.

First of all, I am delighted to learn that marketeer

#2 “very much enjoyed working with me”, although

I feel the urge to mention that I had never heard of

this person before. Next, let me see if I understand

this correctly: I am writing a book chapter for which

I am most likely not going to be paid, and in their

inﬁnite generosity, the publisher is kindly oﬀering to

assist me in promoting the book that they are going

to sell?

But wait. There’s more.

I have also created an Exclusive Discount Of-

fer form. This form allows you to order one

or more copies with our exclusive author dis-

count.

So, I am writing a book chapter for free. I have to do

the promotion of the book myself, and in their inﬁnite

generosity, the publisher is kindly oﬀering a discount

for me to actually buy the book I’m contributing to

write??

But wait. There’s more.

You will hear from us again regarding how

to access a complimentary PDF copy of your

individual chapter in the book.

Wow wow wow. Hold it right there. I am writing a

book chapter for free. I have to do the promotion

of the book myself. I will have to buy the book I’m

contributing to write, and in their inﬁnite generosity,

Didier Verna

TUGboat, Volume 0 (9999), No. 0 1003

the publisher is kindly oﬀering me a “complimentary”

PDF of my own chapter, which I wrote myself, and for

which, obviously, I already have a PDF, and what’s

more, of a much better quality since it has been

generated with pdflatex???

In fact, the situation was not so bad as it seemed

in the ﬁrst place. 3 clauses in the copyright assign-

ment form I eventually received contained implicit

answers to some of my original questions.

2. Author(s) understand that no royalties or

remuneration will be paid by the Publisher to

the author for the above named submitted man-

uscript. Further, Author(s) acknowledge the

manuscript is being provided on a volunteer

basis for the professional recognition obtained

by the publication.

Read: I work for the glory.

5. The Publisher will have the right to edit

the work for the original edition and for any

revision, provided that the meaning of the text

is not materially altered.

We will see later on how a publisher who doesn’t

have a clue about typesetting can actually alter the

meaning of the text without even realizing it . . .

6. The Publisher will furnish 1 copy of the

book to the lead Author of each chapter without

charge. The coauthor(s) of the manuscript will

receive a copy of the manuscript along with a

copy of the title page of the book. Copies of

the book for the author’s/co-author’s use may

be purchased at a 40% discount from the list

price.

So after all, I will get a free copy of the book. And

thank God I wrote my chapter alone, because I would

have hated to have to explain to my co-authors that

they had earned the right to buy the book . . .

4 Proofreading

After all this agitation, I honestly thought that the

worst was ﬁnally behind me. Little did I know . . .

On September 11 (notice the date?) I got a new

message from yet another person at the publisher’s,

inviting me to proofread the book (or at least, my

own chapter):

From: yet@another.guy

I am very pleased to send you the proof of the

book. Please copy and paste this link into your

browser: http://. . . /EditorProof.pdf

I haven’t mentioned yet the apparent publisher’s con-

cern for security, requesting digitally signed copyright

assignments as well as paper copies and so on. All of

this for putting the editor-proof version of the book

Before:

(defclass face ()

((name :initarg :name)

(bold :initarg :bold)))

After:

(defclass face ()

((name:initarg:name)

(bold:initarg:bold)))

Figure 2: Removing spaces between identiﬁers

online and sending the url in the clear by email . . .

Anyway. The deadline for proofreading was 6 days

later only, there was a list of items to speciﬁcally

check for, and there was also the following comment

in the message.

Please do not be concerned with house style

layout application, such as font type / size;

title and subtitle styles; spacing and formatting

For some reason, this smelled very bad to me, and

I decided to pay a very special attention to those

points. I was quite right (but that, you guessed)!

On September 17, I ﬁnished proofreading my

chapter, and sent the following message.

To: yet@another.guy

There are many things that have gone wrong

in my chapter. Some of them may belong to

your “do not be concerned with house style”

category, but they are so worrying that I need

to mention them anyway.

Then, I started enumerating, by decreasing DEF-

CON level, all the things that had gone wrong in my

chapter, between my Word version and their PDF.

Figures swapped

My chapter contained exactly

two ﬁgures. They managed to swap them. Figure 1

was referencing ﬁgure 2 and vice-versa. That’s what

you get when you don’t let your typesetting software

automate the referencing (let alone the placement).

Code excerpts

Originally, I had a nice layout

for my code examples, automated with

lstlisting

They completely messed up all of them. Worse:

probably by editing the code manually.

First, they “conveniently” removed all spaces

appearing before colons, as shown in ﬁgure 2, hereby

concatenating all consecutive tokens of code. Re-

member clause #5 in the copyright assignment?

The Publisher will have the right to edit the

work [. . . ] provided that the meaning of the

text is not materially altered.

Well, there you go!

The incredible tale of the author who didn’t want to do the publisher’s job, etc.

1004 TUGboat, Volume 0 (9999), No. 0

INTRODUCTION

Domain-specific language (DSL) design and

implementation is inherently a transverse activity

(Ghosh, 2010; Fowler, 2010). It usually requires

from the product team knowledge and expertise in

Figure 3: Fancy spacing

Next, they “prettiﬁed” the double quote string

delimiter character:

(show-keys :key2 "test")

be-

came

(show-keys:key2 “test”)

. Cute, but not a

string anymore.

Pretty much all code excerpts also had their

indentation completely messed up, and I’m not even

mentioning hyphenation (hint: what happens when

you hyphenate a variable name, in a language which

allows dashes in identiﬁers?).

Again, all of this is what happens when someone

clueless about what a programming language actually

is, starts editing code excerpts by hand.

Inline quotes

The formatting of inline quotes,

originally achieved with the

quote

quotation

environments was gone. Basically, all quotations

were turned into mere paragraphs, and therefore

indistinguishable from the surrounding text.

Float positions and references

Along with the

two ﬁgures I mentioned earlier, my code excerpts

were all ﬂoats, placed automatically and referenced

with

varioref

. All placements and references were

destroyed, again, probably by manual editing. Here

are just two examples of what I got:

Blah blah blah . . . is given below in Box 10.

Hint: the box below is Box 9.

Which we can use like this as shown in Box 4:

That sentence, which is not even a correct one (note

the trailing colon), was standing alone as a whole

paragraph in the middle of a page. The box was not

even there.

Spacing

Finally, there were spacing problems in

almost every page of the chapter. Figure 3 illustrates

this. I particularly enjoy the “readability” of the

4th line, and I guess this is what you get from a

typesetting system which is clueless about aesthetics.

5 Epilogue

Facing all this mess, and without the ability to ﬁx

things myself, I ended up wasting countless hours

carefully reviewing every single page, locating all the

problems and noting them down for email reporting,

which I eventually did. On September 21, I received

the following message (note the sender).

From: no-reply

I would like to take this opportunity to express

our many thanks for your excellent contribu-

tion . . .

At the following link you will be able to

access a printable copy of your ﬁnal typeset

chapter in PDF format . . .

Unsurprisingly, many of the problems I had re-

ported before were still unﬁxed, and new problems

had appeared. I performed yet another careful re-

view of the chapter, and boldly worked around the

no-reply individual, sending my new report to all of

my previous contacts at the publisher’s. I didn’t get

any response, but by the looks of the actual book I

received, most of the remaining problems were indeed

ﬁxed.

Several months later, when the book was printed,

I received this ﬁnal message (note the sender again).

From: no-reply

Again, thank you for your outstanding contri-

bution, and we look forward to working with

you on another project.

Well, maybe not! ,

6 Acknowledgment

As far as I could see in the editor-proof version of the

book, most problems I encountered with my chapter

(in code formatting notably) also aﬀected the other

ones, which, I guess, is not really surprising.

In all this marvelous adventure, I wish to express

my gratitude to the editor of the book, who invited

me to write a chapter for it in the ﬁrst place, and

who contributed greatly to the holly hunt for typos

and formatting mistakes, not in one chapter, but in

the whole book.

 Didier Verna

EPITA / LRDE

14-16 rue Voltaire

94276 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre Cedex

France

didier (at) lrde dot epita dot fr

http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier

Didier Verna