[malodyets]

I have worked in ink-on-dead-trees book publishing for over 20 years.

The vast majority of print-interior typesetting is being done with Adobe InDesign.

Some publishers (still) have their own system that does not use Word styles - usually using ASCII tags inserted into the content. These are often legacy approaches dating from the 1980s, but if it works why change it?

A few have begun to use Markdown-based systems, but this is very rare in commercial publishing.

The vast majority of author-to-editor-preproduction workflows are done in Microsoft Word. Some publishers (including the one I worked for, and the ones I work with now) use Word styles for all content formatting. Part of the editorial "pre-production" task is to take what authors give us (font formatting with bold / italic, paragraph formatting with returns and tabs) and convert it to styles.