On Sep 25, 2007, at 4:31 PM, Steve Lamb wrote:
No, my issue is that I have some formatting I want to be there and Ineed to be able to express that formatting in a way that will be accepted by the broadest scope of submission requirements. Working inODT and then either printing it and mailing out the manuscript or simply saving it in Word (and ensure it still looks clean) prior to sending itthrough email is the best bet.
As long as you realize it probably won't look the same to the other person, unless they have the same Word version, the same operating system, and the same fonts.
It's rare that someone sends me a complicated Word file and I'm able to print it cleanly without adjustments. Usually things like spacing and pagination get screwed up due to differences in fonts, different interpretations of tab stops, etc.
The only way to be sure the other person sees what you see is by using a page description language, like PDF.
----A little free advice: If you're planning on writing long documents, such as books, I'm going to humbly suggest that the initial pain of learning a typesetting program (TeX or some equivalent) will save you from worse pain later.
A company I used to work for once did a large operations manual entirely in MS Word 2000. It was a nightmare. Every time the client wanted us to change the format of, say, the section headings, we had to go fix every section heading by hand and ensure they all came out the same. Invariably we'd miss some, which would be flagged on the next review. It took hours, sometimes even days, to make simple global formatting changes. About the time we hit the 650 page mark, Word started corrupting the file and it became impossible to go through more than a few edit/save cycles before the file became unreadable and we had to restore from backup.
In a proper typesetting program, changing the format of a heading means changing the template -- once -- and then regenerating the document. It does the drudgery of maintaining consistency for you.