🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a bunch of comments on the following posting. This comes
from my background as a Professor of Chemistry and frequent publisher.

When my name is associated with my work, {\Huge \em I} am
responsible for what is said. I'll happily take advice from copy-
editors from publishers, but >>I<< am responsible for the final result.


	>BTW, one interesting side note which really has nothing to do with
>document design.  The head of each lab wrote a section describing their
>work.  These sections were then combined with other text and assembled into
>the complete report.  The people writing the individual lab sections had a
>lot of trouble dealing with the discipline that goes with writing a part of
>a whole.  There were stylistic decisions that were made and people had to
>stick to; everything in third person, etc.  One decision that was made was
>that the only people mentioned by name would be the lab heads.  This meant
>you should say "Dr. foobar did such-and-such" even if the actual work was
>done by somebody in Dr. foobar's lab.  One person insisted that the people
>who did the actual work should get the credit by name, and wouldn't back
>down when we told him that this wasn't really a scientific document, but
>was being written for the lay-public and that stylistic uniformity was
>paramount in this situation.  It got real ugly.

If you say "Dr. Foobar did such-and-such", even if he didn't, think
of the legal implications: Say Dr. Swango did it instead. And it was a 
fraud. Oh my!! Say Mr. McDonald (i.e. me) did it, and Dr. Foobar
won a Nobel Prize for the work. Not nice. Not nice at all. (Dr.
Foobar in fact mentioned me in the Nobel lecture.) The person who
insisted that credit be given to the correct people was right. 
VERY right. VERY VERY right. IF you really refused to put in the
real people's names, you should have been summarily fired. What would
have happened if the person who did the work sued?

>	Another problem was convincing people that page-count was
>important.  Everybody was told to aim for X pages.  Some came in short,
>some came in long.  A little variation was OK, but some were sent back with
>instructions to "cut a half a page or we'll do it for you" (but nicely).
>Some people just wouldn't listen and eventually we did have to do it for
>them, often with a lot of screaming and yelling resulting.  Once everything
>was assembled, people got galleys back for proofing, with instructions to
>only look for typos, mispellings, missing words, and stuff like that.
>Passages which had been badly garbled during the text-hacking process could
>be fixed up, but only if they stayed about the same length.  Some people
>came back with an extra half page of text, and got really pissed when we
>told them "page layout is already locked up, you just *CAN'T* do this!"

You do have my sincere sympathy about this sort of problem.

-- 
>Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute


Doug McDonald