Category Archives: Publishing

Formatting references – time to stop reverse engineering?

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I have been in the business of book and journal composition for over 25 years. A lot has changed, but a lot hasn’t. In general, the production process, from authoring to publication has a lot of inefficiencies. Continue reading

Category: Publishing

A tribute to Hermann Zapf

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I have just heard the sad news that Hermann Zapf, one of the greatest type designers, passed away today. If the name “Zapf” rings a bell, that is because he designed Zapf Chancery, Zapf Dingbats, and the beautifully flowing Zapfino with the myriad typographic variations. Continue reading

Category: Typography, TeX

Illustrations at the SSP conference

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Graphic recorder Greg Gersch was busy illustrating the SSP conference while listening to the talks. These were huge posters, and I photographed them at quite high resolution in case no one else was doing that. so here they are. Just click on each picture and click again to enlarge. Continue reading

Category: Publishing

A type nerd goes to MOMA

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I love typography, and I have been to several international conferences on the subject. The problem is that now I find it concentrate on the content of a piece of text, but look at the type instead, whether it is good or bad! Two days ago I had lunch with a friend who has a senior post at MOMA. Continue reading

Category: Publishing, Typography

The blind physicist

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I was proud that the Council of Science Editors (CSE) asked me to host a panel to discuss a rather specialized subject, namely the techniques for typesetting mathematical content, at the upcoming conference in Philadelphia. I was happy to accept the request and you can see details of my panel near the top of this page. Continue reading

Category: XML, Accessibilty

A look at papers published by Frontiers

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This is the second in my series of evaluating open access publishers who have the good sense to make the XML as well as their PDFs of their documents available. To emphasize why I am doing this, I support open access, and I particularly advocate the publication of XML, which is supposed to be the definitive version of an article. Continue reading

Category: Publishing, XML

We should applaud higher profits, not lower profits

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[I was just about to post this, but a similar post was just published by Mike Taylor. I have not ready that carefully yet, but I will publish this quick before I am tempted to change it. 😉 ]

In recent years there has been a lot of criticism of the large profits made by publishers. Much of the criticism comes from Open Access “activists” (in the best sense of the word). Continue reading

Category: Work, Business, Publishing

Journal of Brief Ideas

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I came across this site via a twitter feed. It's simple. You need to log in with ORCID, so there is no ambiguity about who you are, and you can then publish an idea in less than 200 words, and tag it so that it is searchable in future. The "publication" is assigned a DOI straight away. It is extremely minimalist and has very few features as it stands, but I can't help thinking this is the way science should be reported. Advantages I see:

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Category: Life, Publishing