Most ROTEL Project books that were in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields utilized LaTeX to accurately and consistently display items such as formula or mathematical notation.

From The LaTeX Project’s About page:

LaTeX, which is pronounced «Lah-tech» or «Lay-tech» (to rhyme with «blech» or «Bertolt Brecht»), is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing.

Standard Policy

The Technical Editor worked through the text and converted each mathematical or scientific formula or notation into LaTeX using third-party tools to help generate the code used.

Rationale

Most STEM authors did not create their drafts with LaTeX coding in mind, and they were generally not aware of its existence. Instead of requesting that the authors do this work, PST opted to handle this part on our end.

Lessons Learned

Time-consuming: When working with a book that contained a significant amount of mathematical or scientific notation, the process to convert it into LaTeX is, predictably, time-consuming. Books that required this level of editing from the Technical Editor easily required projected publication dates to be pushed further out as the text was worked through.

Human Error: Because the books were drafted in Word or Google Docs almost exclusively, it was difficult to catch each instance of scientific or mathematical notation. For many of the publications, the authors pointed out that a formula didn’t look like the others and the Technical Editor had to go back through to create the LaTeX code in the text.

As technology and innovation continues to move forward, we expect that LaTeX tools will be further incorporated to ease this process.