Microsoft Word files are designed for office/business documents (letters, memos, etc) and are not generally suitable for publishing applications. However, Word is often the only application that authors have ever seen (apart from their browser and mailer), and many will even be unaware that any other software exists.
This document explains how to use Named Styles in a template to create and edit Word documents to a level usable for publication, and (for e-journal publishers) how to create and distribute a template of styles for authors themselves to use.
January 2007
8. Editing
It is the responsibility of the journal editor[s] to ensure that the documents are correctly marked with the right style names in the right places. If there is a new formatting feature you need, come and discuss it.
In editing the text of articles, some standard conventions are needed. You will need to make sure your documents conform to this for publication-quality output.
Be very careful of what your authors have used:
A hyphen is only used in compound words like ‘frequently-asked’. If you or your authors have copied and pasted text from elsewhere, check that they have not accidentally included words which were originally hyphenated manually at a line-break: you can detect these by searching each document for a hyphen followed by a space, as in ‘uni- versity’.
A short dash is used between numeric ranges, as in ‘pages 29–37’. Do not use a hyphen for this. You can check for the error by doing a Regular Expression search for '[0-9]\-[0-9]'.
A long dash is used like parentheses—like this—to separate a phrase in a sentence. Some styles put spaces either side, others don't (if you want spaces, make sure the space before the dash is a non-breaking (‘hard’) space ane the one after the dash is a normal space, so that when the text is typeset, the dash can never occur at the start of a line). Never use a hyphen for this. You can check for the error by searching for hyphens preceded or followed by spaces.
A minus sign must only occur in mathematical expressions like x−y. The hyphen or dashes should never be used for this.
Some authors habitually add spaces before closing punctuation marks. These spaces must be removed, because they can cause premature line-breaks when displayed or typeset. There should never be any space before closing punctuation marks (full stops, commas, colons, semicolons, exclamation marks, question marks, closing quotes, etc). There should always be a space after.
The use of two spaces after a sentence is a hang-over from the days of the typewriter, and is unnecessary but harmless, and will be ignored.
There should never be a space after the apostrophe in anglicisations of Irish names like O'Brien, as this can also cause unwanted line-breaks when typeset. When using the name in Irish, make sure the unbreakable (‘hard’) space or thin space ( ) is used, as in Ó Briain, so that unwanted line-breaks are prevented.
Make sure that authors have not used manually-typed full stops (periods) like this...they should be changed to the ellipsis character (…) to get the right spacing. There should be no space before or after an ellipsis within a sentence, and there should be no extra full stop (period) after an ellipsis at the end of a sentence. If spacing is required in your style, it can be added automatically in the stylesheet.
Make sure that all titles and section headings are capitalised consistently. By preference, do not used the (US) method of capitalising every word unless that is required by your discipline. Never use all-capitals for titles and headings in your documents. They can easily be made all-caps by the stylesheet if you need the displayed that way, but they can never be de-capitalised for re-use in the Table of Contents if they are stored in all-caps.
An article must only have one title. Any additional titling is a subtitle.
If you want the sections and subsections numbered, it must be done in the stylesheet. Section and subsection headings must not be manually numbered in the document. Using the stylesheet means they will all conform to your defined style, without you having to do anything.
The same applies to lists: decide once and for all when you design your layout what numbering system you want to use (eg 1, 2, 3,… or i, ii, iii,… or a, b, c,…) and what punctuation you allow (periods [full points], parentheses, etc); and then enforce that style.
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, Electronic Publishing Unit • 2011-07-03 • (other) |
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