[XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly community

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Dear Dr McCollum,

In my field, which is Sanskrit and classical Indian studies (indology), many
people are using LaTeX, and especially, now, XeLaTeX.  One of the factors
has been the package Ledmac <http://tug.ctan.org/pkg/ledmac>, which allows
for producing complex critical editions, something that is quite popular
these days in classical Indian studies.  There's a "manuscripts turn" in the
field (which must sound nice to a HMML person).  The other is that a
nice Devanāgarī
font <http://sarovar.org/projects/devnag/> was designed in Metafont quite
some years back, and has enabled the typesetting of book and papers in
original script.  Finally, the simple ability of LaTeX to do almost all the
non-standard accents we need for working in romanization has also been a
great boost to its acceptance.

(Xe)LaTeX is especially popular amongst the younger generation of university
scholars in Indian studies - by which I suppose I mean people in their 30s
and early 40s.  Several very advanced users at places like Columbia,
Hamburg, Vienna, Oxford, Paris, Berkeley, Chicago, and so forth.

Some of the publishers who serve our community of Asianists are quite
LaTeX-savvy.  Brill, for example, and Springer and Kluwer can all accept
LaTeX files for their journals.  Many others can't - and it's always painful
to have to downgrade a beautiful document to Word, and always a struggle
using the amazing TeX4ht.  A recently started OA indological journal,
eJIM<http://bjournals.ub.rug.nl/index.php/ejim/>,
takes LaTeX by preference.

Many, many years ago, I spent a Christmas month at St John's, and of course
visited HMML.  Lasting memories and admiration.

Best wishes,

Dr Dominik Wujastyk
Institut für Südasien-, Tibet- und Buddhismuskunde
Universität Wien
Spitalgasse 2-4, Hof 2, Eingang 2.1
A-1090 Vienna
Austria


On 22 October 2010 16:15, McCollum, Adam <acmccollum101 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear list members,
>
> I realize that for publications in math and the sciences using TeX, etc.
> has been common, and perhaps even strongly encouraged or required, for many
> years. It is, alas, not yet at least, so in the humanities generally. Thanks
> to XeLaTeX's ability to work well with non-Latin scripts, it is perhaps
> becoming better known in the fields in which I work (Semitic and other
> eastern languages), but it is still somewhat of a surprise, I think, to find
> colleagues who hear "LaTeX" and do not respond with, "What?"! I am writing
> to ask for some thoughts on the predicament of using and enjoying XeLaTeX in
> my work, but not really being able to employ it for anything that will be
> published, since essentially every publisher wants only a .doc or .rtf file.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Adam McCollum, Ph.D.
> Lead Cataloger, Eastern Christian Manuscripts
> Hill Museum & Manuscript Library
> Saint John's University
> P.O. Box 7300
> Collegeville, MN 56321
>
> (320) 363-2075 (phone)
> (320) 363-3222 (fax)
> www.hmml.org
>
>
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