I just finished a 119 hour work week. 8am till 1am for the past two weeks trying to get the next issue ready for publication. I am still behind schedule!
I am wondering just how much writers know what is all entailed in publishing a magazine or book. Do writers know just how much work goes into the presentation, layout, editing, illustration, printing, and marketing of one issue.
I have found that the writers who understand the process of the industry submit documents which are easily formatted and edited.
One nightmare I have come to fear is the:
HARDBREAK LINE SPACING and HARD SPACE INDENTATION in e-subs.
What this is: This is where a writer uses his character return (enter key) to create line breaks or he uses the space bar to create indents. Rather than using the word processor's formatting features to do this automatically.
This is up there with using weird fonts or text colors.
It sometimes takes hours to fix this problem. And the writer for whatever reason is not always accessible to fix it himself or doesn't understand what I mean.
So when you are submitting your work to editors format your document in such a way that it reduces the editor's workload rather than increase it.
Okay back to more coffee, coffee is my friend- sleep? dont need no stinking sleep just coffee...
JB Skaggs
But I totally agree that that would be incredibly aggravating. Have you considered specifying more formatting guidelines in your submission guidelines? Or just return the stories to the author for more formatting work. You shouldn't have to do that kind of stuff.
Don't accept submissions in the body of an email, make them attach it as a file. That will stop any email program modifications that are not expected. I'm sure you could enlist some additional volenteer help to weed out some of the slush if you needed it.
SELECT ALL (CTRL-A)
CENTER JUSTIFY
LEFT JUSTIFY
The leading spaces will disappear. And this action only takes about 5 seconds to do. I do this all the time with our flash challenge subs that come in this way.
/end shameless self-promotion
I must admit I had to do it a couple of times in college because I didn't have Word or WordPerfect at home, and the only word processing program on the computer was an old version of WordPad (the lame excuse for a word processor that comes with windows) that doesn't have double-spacing as an option. It easily added something like half and hour to the whole document preparation side of things. Why anyone would willfully subject themselves to something like that, I do not know?
As for the editing woes, I can sympathize. When I worked at the newspaper, I would spend 25 to 30 hours a week on editting and formatting, and that was with stuff that was typed in properly and ready to go. Not to mention I wasn't the only one working on the layout, etc. It is one of the bigger jobs associated with putting out a publication. I know I spent more time researching stories and laying things out than I ever spent doing actual writing.
... I'll have to think of that and edit my manuscripts myself ahead of time if i send to you. personally, i prefer NOT using the auto-indent and have it turned off. why? simple, it misbehaves too often adding those mangy indent marks in where i don't want them.
imagine having a new line get auto-indented when it is a new line by virtue of word-wrapping. this happens to me regularly.
but to each their own, and i shall certainly be sure to format to the editor's preference rather than my own when i actually send something out. to do else... anyone wanna say career derailment with me?
quote:
personally, i prefer NOT using the auto-indent and have it turned off. why? simple, it misbehaves too often adding those mangy indent marks in where i don't want them.
Turn off Auto-Format-As-You-Type and that problem will go away. Alternatively, set up a Word Style that handles the indentation for each paragraph. There are no "marks" or "hidden tab characters" to be concerned with then.
Here's where you problem truly lies....
Start Word. Select TOOLS>AUTO CORRECT. Click on the "Auto Format as You Type" tab in the dialog box. Uncheck "Format beginning of list item like the one before it" and "Define Styles based on your formatting" and pretty much everything under the heading "Apply as you type". It's all crap -- utterly worthless for manuscripts. Heck, you might as well uncheck everything in that particular tab, especially the "replace --" one, which forces an actual em dash rather than two small dashes (hyphens)...
These things will solve your problems with funky indentations. Trust me.
[This message has been edited by HSO (edited April 26, 2005).]
Let's not let this topic turn into a topic battling over which program is better, please. We all make do with what we have. I'm hopeful that I can at least help people make do a little better than they could before using software that isn't necessarily intuitive at times, and certainly can be utterly frustrating most of the time.
[This message has been edited by HSO (edited April 26, 2005).]
Yesterday I refused to work on the magazine at all and took a break before I beat my computer to death with a sledge hammer.
The other editors I speak with all nod knowingly when I explain I don't own a Mac.
But I suspect you'll always run into formatting errors when moving between programs. You can eliminate many of them by doing the above, but you can also write simple Macros in Word to automate the process for you. Well, maybe not simple, but they can certainly be written. It depends on what your true issues are.
There's a "show hidden characters" feature in Word... it looks like a hidden paragraph mark on the toolbar. When you get a Word file, turn that on and do a quick inspect before copying and pasting. It will show tabs, leading spaces, and extra line breaks. If it's messed up, you'll know right away, before you put it into your Desktop Pub proggie.
Alternatively, you can "risk" Word's Auto Format function and have it do the work for you. It's fairly good and fixes a lot of these things automatically, but you have to tell it NOT to do some things or it can make it much, much worse.
Experience and practice will make it all go much easier eventually. Hang in there... find the shortcuts and use them.
.
As a professional graphic designer, I know of no one in the field of presses and printing that has even one iota of respect for Publisher. It's a mickey-mouse level toy program, invented so office secretaries can crank out newsletters on their little in-house laser printers.
If you are doing serious printing, you might consider switching to Pagemaker (aka In-Design) or Quark. There is a reason those programs are expensive. They are worth it. But if it reduces the number of hours in your work week, wouldn't it be worth it?
Ragtime I've never heard of.
In-Design is supposed to be Adobe's answer to Quark. I haven't had the chance to try it out, but I've heard it is pretty good. Since it's from Adobe, it is at least designed to work with Photoshop and Illustrator.
Quark is my favourite. I love that program, I'd like it a lot more if I could actually afford it. 
If I was still in publishing, I'd find a way to own it.
When I finally get a home computer, I might check out that Ragtime, just to see how it stacks up.
BTW1: if you are using Quark or InDesign, all useful formatting, like underscoring to indicate italics, disappears when you import text anyway, and you are left with going through the hardcopy to find each one. (That's why you should never actually just italicise the text in your manuscript, it is too hard to pick-up when you scan the hardcopy.)
BTW2: Who teaches people to put two spaces at the end of a sentence?
As to the Quark vs Predator (InDesign) question. I have both. Quark is still better but the difference in price is ridiculous. InDesign has too many bells and whistles, it needs to slim-down and specialise.
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited April 26, 2005).]
In other words start soliciting articles and designing future issues well in advance, maybe get your partner involved in that part. This is not a one person job.
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited April 26, 2005).]
*Deep Sigh*
quote:
BTW2: Who teaches people to put two spaces at the end of a sentence?
That would be your old 9th Grade Typing Teacher who had never seen a font beyond Courier in her life, and knew nothing about computers and had never heard the word "kern".
I found it didn't matter how much I railed and ranted at my co-workers to STOP using double spaces at the end of a sentence, they just couldn't change their habits. So I changed mine and quit yelling, and just sucked it up and spent the time required to strip the suckers out.
quote:
how do you create a line break between paragraphs without using the ENTER key?
To create a single line break, hold down the SHIFT key while hitting your ENTER key.
(Technically, that didn't answer your question of how to do it without hitting the ENTER key, but I suspect it answers your real question, which is how to keep from getting a double-spaced return?)
[This message has been edited by Elan (edited April 26, 2005).]
Likewise, two spaces after a colon is standard, to help distinguish it from a semilcolon (which gets only one space.
Indents should be set at approx. 5 spaces (but not done manually, of course. Set up your word processor to do it for you. Don't use tabs, they are a pain to deal with electronically.)
And the reason for all of this is because of the publishers who still PRINT magazines. Hard copies are sent to the typesetters, who image them and make their printing plates. They need to be able to clearly identify what is what. Modern typefaces make this difficult. Stick with Courier or Courier New, use two spaces after a period, do not use spaces before and after an em dash (which should be two hyphens or small dashes, not one single large dash [turn this off in Word] and it should look like this--just like this--when you do it). If a zine or mag publisher asks for something different, it's up to the author to change their manuscript. If you took the time to setup your manuscript template properly, these changes can be propagated in minutes, not hours.
I'm always reminded of the best advice I ever got while in the military: "Work smarter, not harder." This applies equally well to manuscript formatting.
JBSkaggs, I just looked at your formatting guidelines. I think the easiest thing you could do to ease your workload is to add the things you've complained about here to the guidelines on your website.
Oh, and for those people who want Quark, if you check this page out, http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/purchase/education/ they have an educational discount that drops the price from $1300 to $199.
[This message has been edited by MaryRobinette (edited April 27, 2005).]
quote:
I think the easiest thing you could do to ease your workload is to add the things you've complained about here to the guidelines on your website.
Er... what about me? I said that above, too. Dang it. No one listens to me. From now on, I'm going to send my responses directly to Mary. Everyone listens to Mary.
Of course, no one will ever see my repsonses, because Mary won't have time to forward them to the board, nor should she do so even if she did have. But hey... why not, right?
I just wonder how long it will take before Mary blocks my email address... two times, three max?
Hey, JB! What's the next theme going to be for FWG?
[This message has been edited by HSO (edited April 27, 2005).]
Compared to the student rate for In-Design (around $300-ish CAD), there was no way I would have bought Quark. Just too much cost, too much hassel.
This new setup might make it easier and far more worthwhile to go with Quark...
Thanks for the link, Mary.
Consider having your themes solidified well in advance, and then you can post all of them in advance on your website. This will give authors (and artists) plenty of time to write stories that match your theme. 3 months may seem like a lot of time, but I like to sit on my stories for at least that long before the final edit/draft. By then, I've forgotten all about them and I can look at them fresh.
Just a thought.
And until the first year is finished it is the startup stage.
I was hoping for the dinosaurs like from Piers Anthony's book about dentists in space.
[This message has been edited by JBSkaggs (edited April 27, 2005).]
I was griping about artwork for print not disseminating false doctrine on formatting manuscripts 
[This message has been edited by hoptoad to sound less nasty.]
[This message has been edited by hoptoad again to sound even less nasty.]
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited April 27, 2005).]