🚀 go-pugleaf

I have to agree with most of Alan Jeffrey's points. I have edited a
conference proceedings each year for the last five years, and it has
ruined months of my life. I think it depends on the interaction
between two things: the subject matter, and the authors. If, for
instance, all the authors use mathematics, BUT a large proportion use
something like Macwrite, the effort putting into producing a book with
LaTeX might be worthwhile. Unless you can guarentee that over 50% of
the authors will produce *logical markup*, be prepared for hours of
madness. Get used to writing zillions of one-off programmettes to sort
out author A's idiosyncracies. The golden rule is

  Authors Ignore Instructions

My topical tips:

 - go for PostScript pictures, even if it means scanning originals and
   using the image. the usefulness of arbitrary scaling to fit the
   right space is invaluable. dont even consider cut and paste unless
   you have an assistant to do it
 - if you do it, go the whole hog. I use LaTeX, and convert all the
   references to BibTeX format. its time-consuming, but when its done,
   I get guarenteed consistency of layout, and guarenteed
   correspondence between references in the text and the bibliography.
   saves a lot of checking. similarly, symbolic cross-referencing is
   slow, but is wonderful when a last minute paper arrives and all the
   chapter numbers change
 
Sebastian
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Sebastian Rahtz                        S.Rahtz@uk.ac.soton.ecs (JANET)
Computer Science                       S.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Bitnet)
Southampton S09 5NH, UK                S.Rahtz@sot-ecs.uucp    (uucp)