Excursus

Nature has announced that it cannot accept OOXML documents:

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.

And so has Science:

Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.

Though, why anyone would be using Word for scientific document processing is beyond me. Indeed, the scientific community’s support for LaTeX during the ascendancy of word-processing—during the triumph of the Image over the Word—is heroic, and for this we are indebted to them. Even if a latter-day St Benedict of document processing has yet to arrive thus establishing editing with structural markup as the norm.