[texhax] Scientific Word documents

[Michael Barr]

I have a colleague who refuses to learn any version of tex.  He uses 
Scientific Word.  I had tried an earlier incarnation with a different name 
about 25 years ago and found it hard to use and unsatisfactory.  So when 
this colleague wanted to submit a paper to my latex-based journal that was 
written in SW I was rather apprehensive since it would be my job to get it 
in shape.  But I asked him to send me the output file (which is used as an 
input to latex) and quite pleasantly surprised to find it to be quite 
standard latex.

For example, I expected to find that section heads would be produced by 
some combination of \vspace, \bold, a counter, \large, the title and more 
\vspace.  No, it was done with \section. And so on, at every point it 
seemed to be quite standard latex and I had no problem at all with it.

This probably depends a lot on how the user actually uses it.  I have also 
seen papers that were full of roll-your-own formatting that has to be 
removed.  Sometimes I send the paper back to the author.  One author 
recently decided to state his theorems partly in bold and the rest in 
italics.