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When Microsoft announced that Office 2007 would use the OOXML format as its default file format the company sought to assure customers that the change was for the best. But judging by the experiences of two major scientific publishers, Microsoft may have misjudged the market.
At least two major scientific publishers, <cite>Science</cite> and <cite>Nature</cite>, are both [refusing to accept documents in the new Word 2007 format][1]. Science's authoring guidelines contain the following warning:
>Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow ... Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision.
While Science doesn't detail their internal workflow beyond saying that it involves Word 2003, the follow highlights the major issue with OOXML from many publishers' point of view:
>Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision ... because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- *for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us* -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML. (emphasis mine)
Nature's guidelines for authors contain a similar warning:
>We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and typesetting programs."
For reasons that baffle just about everyone familiar with the issue, Microsoft has chosen to replace the industry standard language for displaying mathematical equations -- MathML -- with their own proprietary version, which, as the above quotes illustrate, almost no one outside of Redmond is interested in using.
Just one of the many reasons why OOXML just doesn't work.
What remains to be seen is whether industry leading publishers like Nature and Science will convert their workflow to use OOXML's proprietary formats, or simply stick with the the systems they have which use the existing and well-established MathML format.
Given what I know about the publishing industry, I suspect that it will be a very long time before print publications invest in a radical new publishing standard that ties them down to a single piece of software.
[via [O'Reilly Radar][2]]
[1]: http://prorev.com/2007/05/science-pubs-reject-articles-written-in.htm "Science Pubs Reject Articles Written In Word 2007"
[2]: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/06/science_and_nat.html "Science and Nature rejecting Word 2007 Manuscripts"
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