So General Question-wise, we’re done here, yes?
i believe we are. the answer to my question appears to be “word.”
if anyone has a site where i can look over some of the problems with word i would like to know. such as i first mentioned the decimal tab situation.
Hmm… maybe we have different aims here. All the work I tend to do never needs to be edited once it goes out. its the final copy so it never needs to be changed. Generally, its stuff like minutes, announcements, short pieces of fiction and the like. Plus, Im a CS student in a fairly rabid unix environment so any .doc attachment is a definate no-no. (In fact, .doc attachments should be a no-no in the first place. Too many malicious virii that latch onto word documents). Its sort of carried over into my everyday life. For stuff that needs to be edited, I use txt, rtf and LaTeX in order of power. I still use word for all of my work but its strictly for internal consumption only.
That’s what I thought. Most people outside the field have no idea how much work gets done to a submission after it goes to an editor. The editor makes corrections, it gets copyedited, it may go back to the writer for more work, the editor or art director marks it up for the printer, who makes galleys which get proofed and corrected and marked up for final printing. (And even that oversimplified the process.) The last thing anybody in this world wants is final copy. That’s for the professional printers to do.
Remember that lots of people in the field still work with typewriters and that lots of places won’t take electronic submissions, only hard copy.
The answer to the OP is that either you submit in a format specified by the recipient, or you can use Word or .txt files.