Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

davidacoder — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 11:35:36 GMT

Just two points:

It is not only Science and Nature, I have yet to come across any journal that would accept Word 2007 documents.

And second: Have you contacted the publishers of these journals? Have you tried to find out what blocks them from accepting the new equations is? Are you proactivly trying to mitigate this situation?

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

MurrayS — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 08:25:06 GMT

We are in the process of contacting Nature and Science to understand their difficulties better and hopefully to offer solutions. The new docx math format is substantially richer typographically than earlier formats and should be considerably more valuable for a publisher. Admittedly when you have an infrastructure that works, the easiest thing is to just keep using it. But the thoroughly documented docx format should provide a much more faithful conversion path than that of the earlier doc format and MathML is readily extracted from it. In addition, we have more exciting things in mind. It's a great time to be a scientist, engineer, mathematician, or student of those disciplines.

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

davidacoder — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:56:31 GMT

Excellent to hear that! I guess a lot has to do with third party apps they use in the downstream processing of documents and their compatability with the docx format. I don't really know, but presumably most DTP programs are not yet compatible with docx? Or are they? But sorting these things out with publishers would be incredibly helpful.

Also, quite a number of journals use automated systems for paper submission, where you essentially upload a doc file and then they create a pdf out of it on the server. They will need to invest quite heavily to update those pieces of software, I guess... I came across http://www.editorialmanager.com quite often, maybe working with them to add docx support would be helpful?

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

MurrayS — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 04:04:10 GMT

Thanks for the lead. Word 2007 files can be "published" in pdf format by Word itself. The user does have to download the Office 2007 pdf handler from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&DisplayLang=en

since Adobe didn't want Microsoft to ship it with Office 2007. But once that's installed, you can create the pdf directly from Word and then post it on the web. I've been using this facility for over a year now with my Unicode Technical Note #28 (http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v2.pdf)

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

davidacoder — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 14:08:30 GMT

That is not the sort of functionality these editorial systems provide. Here is how it works: An author uploads his paper, often it has to be uploaded as a number of seperate documents (one with the title, abstract and author details, one without any clue of who wrote it, one with the figures, one with the tables etc). The backendsystem then combines these various documents into a number of PDFs automatically: One where everything is combined for the author to submit, one for the editors, one for the reviewers (and for those for example the parts with the author name are excluded). All of this runs on backend servers, and essentially the software that runs there would need to be changed to accept docx files as input. Obviously that is a major, major investment to update these backend systems, after all the software would be required to almost understand the entire spec for docx if it wanted to compile it into pdf.

What might help a lot would be a code component provided by you guys that handles some of that conversion. Have you for example considered a component (dll) to which you can fetch a docx file and spit out pdf data? You must have all the code around, but making that available for third party developers might make it incredibly simpler to modify such backend systems to be able to deal with the new file formats.

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

MurrayS — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 04:36:21 GMT

Word 2007's object model does have the method Document.ExportAsFixedFormat, which enables a program to export pdf from Word. To see this, launch Word, type Alt+F11 to get to Visual Basic, then choose View/Object browser and click on Document. Further clicking on ExportAsFixedFormat shows this method's prototype and the argument WdExportFormat can take either wdExportFormatPDF or wdExportFormatXPS.

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

davidacoder — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:03:38 GMT

I don't know how they implemented their conversion at the server.

But automating Word via the object model on the server seems a sure way to kill any scalability... That suggestion might work for small desktop apps, but never ever for a server app which needs to convert stuff. The guidence from MS itself very clearly advises against using the automation object model in server apps.

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 10:42:54 GMT

I don't think the keypoint is that Science and Nature are able or not to deal with " Word 2007’s elegant new mathematics facility".

These publishers should only accept a standardized format (such as ODF) or the widespread latex source files. This would prevent authors to bother about the version of word they're using.

As long as MS has not provided a real standard (ISO approved), editors should recommand other solutions.

Best regards,

re: Science and Nature have difficulties with Word 2007 mathematics

Léo Studer — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 10:52:35 GMT

When it comes to scientific publishing, one has to deal with the great variety of hardware, software, OS, and such...

Since Word isn't an inter-operable solution, it makes absolutely no sense to use it as a so-called "widespread medium" for disseminating the papers.

Microsoft is still trying to hook the market with it's closed and windows-only software and file formats. I'm afraid this is totally in contradiction with what Science is all about.

Useful OpenXML links

Pablo Fernicola's Personal Blog — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:52:22 GMT

I have not been posting as frequent as I would have liked, but I plan to correct this soon. Meanwhile, here are several links to useful OpenXML (wordprocessingML and Word 2007 focused) links: End user downloads Compatibility packs for older ver