Taco Hoekwater EUROTEX 2009 E141

The Typesetting of StatisticsAbstractThe Dutch translation of the 750 page textbook ‘Introduc-tion to the Practice of Statistics’ is typeset using a set ofConTEXt macros. This article gives a short impression ofthe production process of this book, showing that the use ofTEX for the actual typesetting was perhaps the least cum-bersome part of the process.

The original version‘Introduction to the Practice of Statistics’ is a fairly heftytextbook in what I consider a typical ‘United States’style: it is full-color throughout, in a fairly large formatthat combines theory and practice, bound in a singlehardcover book, and is printed on rather thin paper. Ithas been typeset using LATEX.

The Dutch version‘Statistiek in de praktijk’ in turn is a fairly typicaladaptation to the Dutch market: The body is printed ingrayscale, it has a slightly smaller format, the originalis split into two paperbacks (a textbook and a workbook)and it is printed on standard thickness paper. It is typesetusing ConTEXt.

History of the Dutch versionThe Vrst edition was printed elsewhere, and the originalDutch sources that I received used macroTEX by AmyHendrickson. This source was converted to plain TEX forthe second and third editions, using a bunch of specialpurpose extension macros.

During this time, there was one TEX source Vle foreach chapter body, one for each chapter title page, andone for each chapter preface.

The Dutch publisher skipped the fourth edition tosave on expenses.

For the Vfth edition, I switched to ConTEXt for easieruse of graphic objects and references. In the process, thesource Vle layout was converted to the standard ConTEXtmodel for projects so that a single texexec call can beused to generate each of the books. However, makeindexis still being used for the index generation instead of thenormal ConTEXt methods.

The fifth editionThe Dutch translation of the Vfth edition was sent tous as a bunch of Microsoft Word Vles (one per originalchapter), and we were lucky enough to also receive theoriginal sources of the English version.

The Word data format itself was Vne with us, but actualcontent posed a number of problems:

@ There were quite a lot of vocabulary diUerences be-tween the chapters because four diUerent translatorshad been working simultaneously.

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@ Parts of the translation were missing: anything in theVfth edition that was identical to the text in the thirdedition was not translated. We were expected to copythese blocks over from the Dutch sources of the thirdedition.

@ There were accidental omissions in the translation.@ The graphics also needed to be translated, converted

to grayscale, and corrected in Adobe Illustrator, thenexported as EPS, and Vnally converted to PDF.

@ The page location remarks in the translation Vlesreferred to the Dutch version of the third edition,instead of to the actual page numbers in the EnglishVfth edition.

The last item above was by far the most problematic,because after the Vrst proofs came back, it becamenecessary to have Vve pretty large piles of paper on thedesk at all times:

1. The printout of the original Word Vles (because ofthe meta data).

2. The Dutch third edition (for continuous reference).3. The English Vfth edition (also for reference).4. The editor-corrected printout of the Dutch Vfth edi-

tion proofs (for correction).

5. A stack of printouts of various email messages anddocuments with corrections and addenda sent in bythe translators.

Handling Word filesFor the main text, the Word Vles were exported to HTMLin OpenOXce, followed by a cleanup script written bySiep Kroonenberg.

The tabular material was imported from the EnglishLATEX sources using a dedicated ConTEXt module thatimplements the LATEX tabular environment. Using that,much of the tabular data could be copied straight over.The exceptions were tables containing decimal points(those were converted to commas) and tables dealingwith money (where all amounts had to be converted intoeuros).

Mathematical formulas were re-keyed. This was nota big problem, as almost all formulas needed editing forlocalization anyway.

Taco HoekwaterElvenkind BVtaco (at) elvenkind dot com