Washington Apple Pi Journal Writer's Guidelines 2003

The time has finally come: Washington Apple Pi Journal is no longer accepting articles in Apple II or III format. Of course, we haven't actually had any submissions in these formats for several years, but the fact remains that if an Apple II Unidisk floppy disk arrived, we'd have to struggle to do something useful with it. So we're revising our writer's guidelines.

Who can write:

(Almost) anybody can write an article for the Washington Apple Pi Journal. We naturally have a bias towards our own members, but a good article by aliens from the planet Jlknithorpi would be welcomed, too (though we'd insist it be in English). We do not publish press releases masking as magazine articles, or magazine articles sent in by vendors.

What to write about:

Meeting reports: Washington Apple Pi members are scattered across the planet, so the vast majority don't have the opportunity to attend the General Meetings, Special Interest Group meetings, field trips and other Pi events. That being the case, reports on these events are always greatly appreciated. The reports don't have to be from the meeting leader; if a SIG member wants to write about a meeting, that's just fine.

Hardware and software reviews: reviews are always appreciated. But please, don't copy the format of the "professional" magazines that seem to consist of nothing except excerpts from the owner's manual or specifications taken from the side of the box. Write about how it is to actually use a given piece of hardware or software. Write about what you do with it. Include photos or illustrations or screen shots that aren't just reruns of the included demos. Pi readers are interested in how real people -- our own members -- use this hardware or software.

Look what I've done: we love articles about how you use your computer to perform some task. The task can be strange -- building an underwater lobster trap monitoring system out of old Mac SEs -- or it can be more commonplace, such as running a small business using nothing more than AppleWorks. It can also be very specific: if you've figured out a way to, say, use Microsoft Word X and not have the auto formatting drive you nuts, write about it.

How to articles: these are always popular. If you've managed to set up a wireless network in your home using nothing but off-the-shelf equipment, and done it without losing your mind, tell people how. If you've re-wired a San Francisco Victorian home with state-of-the-art surround sound in every room, controlled by an iPod, tell us how. If you know how to use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop to make custom icons for your computer, tell us how.

It works this way: some of the more popular articles are devoted to simply telling how something works. Can you explain to people the relationship between clock speed and computer speed? Can you tell people how to do a port scan, and why they'd want to? Can you explain why a wireless connection probably won't work in the middle of a desert -- or in a lead-lined fallout shelter in your basement? People want to know.

When to write:

Issue deadlines are included on the Table of Contents page of every issue of the Journal. Late submissions have been the number one problem of all Pi editors for the past quarter century. Please do not contribute to this sordid history; surprise us and submit articles well before the deadlines.

Article submissions

All material must be supplied in machine-readable format. If you have an Internet connection, the fastest way to send material is to E-mail it to: maceditor@wap.org. For those lacking an Internet connection, please mail CD-ROMS (first choice) or 3.5 inch, 1.4-megabyte Macintosh-formatted floppy disks (second choice) to:

Washington Apple Pi Journal

Attention: Mac Editor

12022 Parklawn Drive

Rockville, MD 20852

If you do mail something physical to the Pi office, it does help if you can send an E-mail message to maceditor@wap.org telling the editors to look for a package.

Article length

While no one has yet sent a submission as long as a Tom Clancy or Leo Tolstoy novel, there is no hard and fast rule against such long pieces. Most articles tend to be shorter. Use this guide, and your word processor's word count feature, to judge the length of an article:

SIG meeting report	300-500 words
Short note	300-500 words
Short review article	500-800 words
Article	850-1,200 words
Medium article	1,500-2,000 words
Long article	2,250-3,000 words

These lengths are approximate and are intended to serve as guidelines only. Please use your word processor's word count feature to judge length and not the file size reported by the operating system. This article, for example, is slightly over 3,000 words long.

Copyright

Please do not submit material that is not your own or that bears someone else's copyright notice. You may copyright your own material; make sure your byline includes the appropriate notification, such as © 2004 Charlotte Brontë (or whatever is appropriate). Should you have programming code in your article, please include written permission for us to print it, and make sure all the code is your own.

If you quote someone, be sure you get the quote exactly correct, and in context. Short quotations from copyrighted works are permitted for reviews and educational purposes, but only if you get it right.

Archive format

Unless you are submitting something via diskette or CD-ROM, please bundle up your submission in an archive. For over a decade, the archive format of choice for Mac users has been Stuffit (see References at the end of this article). Somewhere on your hard drive you will probably find two applications, Stuffit Expander and DropStuff. DropStuff produces Stuffit archive files; Stuffit Expander does exactly what its name suggests: it expands Stuffit archives into the original files and folders.

Collect all the pieces of your Journal submission into a folder, and give the folder a name, such as "G5inAlaska." Then drop the entire folder onto DropStuff, which will then produce a compressed archive containing everything in the folder. Make sure the archive has a unique name such as "G5inAlaska.sit" (depending on how you've set DropStuff's preferences, it may give the archive the unfortunately ambiguous name of "archive.sit"). Then compose an E-mail message introducing your work, attach the archive file to your message, and send it to maceditor@wap.org. You should get back a confirmation message in a day or two that the submission has been received.

Why send things in an archive? There are several reasons: (1) by bundling everything together, the editors know they have all the pieces; (2) the compression makes the submission smaller, making it faster for you to send and for the editors to receive; (3) Stuffit archives have error checking code, so if something is corrupted in the transmission process, it is easy to detect; and (4) many E-mail systems do odd things to attachments, especially multiple attachments in one message. By submitting things as a single, compressed, error-checking archive, the needs of humans and computers can be met on common ground.

File formats: text

Make sure you include your name, and preferred article title and byline, at the start of your text. If the editors can't figure out who wrote an article, they won't publish it. Even if you want the article published anonymously or under a pseudonym, please stick your name at the start of the article, along with your preferred byline. Your E-mail address and telephone number are also handy, if there are questions. A sentence or two about yourself, at the end of the article, is also appreciated, but entirely optional.

Do not embed graphics within the article. Graphics must be removed before anything else can be done.

Please do not pre-format submissions with columns, text boxes, pull quotes, shadings and such. The editors must undo all your work.

Ideally, articles should be saved in Microsoft Word 5 format. Microsoft Word 6, Word 98, Word 2001, Word X, AppleWorks and ClarisWorks can write files in Word 5 format, so please do so. WordPerfect Mac 3.5, unfortunately, can't do this trick, but it can save files in RTF (Rich Text Format), which can be read by Word. Accordingly, please save any WordPerfect submissions as RTF files. Please make sure that Word documents have a .doc extension, and that RTF documents have an .rtf extension.

You can also send articles as simple ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) text files. While any word processor or text editor can read an ASCII file, please note that a simple text file has no formatting, so you can't show things in bold, italic, underlined, or any other kind of styling. If you are writing an article that requires certain things be bolded or in italics, a text file may not be the best choice. Please make sure that text documents have a .txt extension.

Please do not submit articles by simply typing them into an E-mail message. Reformatting E-mail messages into something useful takes an incredible amount of time.

At present, Journal body copy is in Palatino; if you have Palatino on your machine (most Macs do), formatting your text in Palatino can save the editors some trouble. If your article contains programming code or HTML code the code should be displayed using a mono-spaced font; please use Courier. It would also help if you include a parenthetical note to the editors reminding them of special formatting, such as:

[format in Courier]
for i= 32 to 127
print chr$(i);
next i

Note that, though the Journal is (presently) created in PageMaker, please don't submit PageMaker files. It is very difficult to incorporate PageMaker documents created on different machines into a coherent, working manuscript for publication.

File formats: graphics

Articles with illustrations are invariably more popular than articles without illustrations, so by all means include illustrations. Illustrations should always be included as separate files; don't paste graphics into your text, since the editors must try and remove the graphics before they can do anything with the article. (Yes, this was mentioned above as well. You might guess, correctly, that this is important.)

Please note that every illustration should also include a caption, and captions should either be appended to the end of your article text or be included as a separate file, usually with some useful title such as "G5Alaskacaptions.doc" or whatever is appropriate. Note that Journal readers are scattered all over the planet, so please fully identify any people in photos. "John sitting at his desk" might seem to be a great caption to you, but literally tens of millions of people are named "John," and the vast majority of them probably don't look like the person in your photo.

All of the following are acceptable graphics file formats. Since it isn't usually obvious what kind of graphic a given file might be, please be sure and use the appropriate file extension on all graphics files:

Mac PICT files -- .pict

Acrobat PDF files -- .pdf

TIFF graphics -- .tiff

EPS files -- .eps

JPEG compressed graphics -- .jpg

Things to note:

PICT is the screen shot format used by System 7.0 through Mac OS 9.2.2; to create a screen shot, press (all at the same time) Command-Shift-3 or Command-Shift-4. [The Command key has a cloverleaf or an Apple logo];
Screen shots in Mac OS X are in Acrobat (PDF) format; you create screen shots using the same key combinations mentioned above;
Flatbed scanners usually allow you to save scans in a variety of formats. For Journal purposes; TIFF is usually the best. Never scan anything higher than 150 dpi (dots per inch), since higher sizes simply increase the size of the image without increasing readability;
EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files, such as those produced by Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand, are the most flexible, since PostScript files are "resolution independent" -- the editors can make the graphics as large or small as necessary to fit a space, with no loss of resolution. If you use any non-standard fonts (anything besides Courier, Helvetica, Palatino and Times), please be sure to embed them in your EPS file;
All digital cameras, except the very earliest ones, save photos in either JPEG or TIFF format. While it isn't required, it certainly is nice if you could include the exact model of camera you used as part of your photo captions. Virtually all Journal readers either have a digital camera or are thinking about getting one, and they appreciate learning what was used to create a given photo;
If you want the Journal to use only part of an illustration, please crop the illustration before you submit it;
While the Journal is printed in black and white, many articles are reprinted on the Pi Web site, where color illustrations can be used. If you are feeling exceptionally helpful, save your illustrations in both gray-scale as well as color.

Journal style

The Washington Apple Pi Journal is in every way a publication by, for, and about its members. Accordingly, unlike the Associated Press and Washington Post, no effort is made to make sure that all articles look and sound the same. On the other hand, a large percentage of Pi members are either new to computing or new to the Macintosh, so some consistency is not only desirable, it is all but required. For example, Apple Computer, Inc., is the company that makes Macintosh computers, not Apple, Inc., or Apple, Ltd. Similarly, "mackintosh" is a proper spelling of a type of raincoat, and "McIntosh" is a manufacturer of superb audio equipment, but Apple Computer, Inc., produces computers spelled (or misspelled, depending on your point of view) "Macintosh."

Here are a few general guidelines:

Except for common abbreviations and acronyms, a long name should be spelled out the first time it is mentioned in the article with the abbreviation or acronym after it in parentheses.
Similarly, fully identify individuals the first time they are mentioned, such as "Washington Apple Pi President Martha Washington." Subsequently, you can shorten this to "Martha" or "Washington," as appropriate.
Numbers, including money, should be written with commas where appropriate: 1,000 or $13,450.
If a number series occurs within a paragraph, number the series using "(1)," etc.
Do not attempt to line things up using spaces. Most word processors have table tools for creating tables, so use tables to bring order to such information.
Do not use more than one space between sentences, or after punctuation marks. In fact, there should never be more than one space in a row anywhere in your article.
Periods and commas always go inside quotation marks. Other punctuation marks go outside, unless they are part of the quotation.
Add subheads where you think they might be useful, or to break up long passages of text.
Italicize all publication names, such as Washington Apple Pi Journal.
Italicize all software names, such as PageMaker, AppleWorks, etc.
Never put a space before punctuation marks.
Do not use ALL CAPS for titles, subheads, or emphasis. If you want something emphasized, use bold.
Do not use footnotes, as they are difficult to handle. Endnotes are acceptable, but should be avoided if at all possible.
In software or hardware reviews, be sure to include the full name, version, company name, company address, Web address, phone number and price of the hardware or software.

The Journal will not publish material that is offensive, which addresses Pi politics, or which says anything less than flattering about Pi members, either individually or collectively. This is not censorship -- just a matter of good taste.

Glossary

The difference between enlightenment and confusion is, in part, consistency. One Pi reader, with a British education, wanted to know what Pi members had against baby carriages. They had read one article that talked about "zapping pram," and as any good British parent knows, a pram is a baby carriage. The article should have talked about "resetting PRAM (parameter RAM)," which may be only slightly less confusing but at least doesn't suggest Pi members engage in baby buggy abuse.

Note, in particular, the picky, mixed-case punctuation of trademarked, copywrited hardware and software.

$249, not $249.00

2D, 3D (or two-dimensional, three-dimensional), not 2-D, 3-D

40MB HD (40 megabyte hard disk)

640K (640 kilobyte)

AirPort (unless you mean a landing field for planes)

AppleCare

AppleScript

AppleWorks

ASCII, not (shudder) Asky 2

back up (verb)

backup (noun)

BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution)

CAD (Computer Aided Design)

ColorSync, not Colorsynch

database, not data base

demonstrated, not demoed

demonstration, not demo

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)

E-mail or email (but not both in the same article)

EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)

FileMaker

Finder

FireWire

G3, G4, G5, not G-3, G-4, G-5

GB (gigabyte)

HyperCard

HyperTalk

IBM-PC

iBook

iCal

iChat

iDVD

iLife

iMac

iMovie

iPhoto

iPod

iTunes

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)

LaserWriter

Mac, not MAC (unless you mean Media Access Control)

Mac OS (Mac OS 7.6 and later)

Mac OS X, not OS X, not X, not Mac X

March 15, not March 15th

MB (megabyte)

MHz (megahertz)

NeXT computer

online, not on-line

OpenGL

PageMaker

Photoshop (no capital S)

PICT

PostScript

Power Mac, not PowerMac

PowerPC (the chip, not the computer)

PRAM (parameter RAM), not pram

Q&A (question and answer)

QuickDraw

QuickTime

RAM (Random Access Memory), not ram

ROM (Read Only Memory), not rom

SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), not scsi

SIG (Special Interest Group)

SIGs (plural form of all-capitalized abbreviation that is preferred)

SuperDrive

System 7.5 (pre-Mac OS, from System 1.1 to System 7.5)

TIFF (Tag Image File Format)

WinTel (Windows/Intel)

word processing; word processor, not WP or wordpro

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)

X11 (shorthand name for UNIX X-Window system)

Xserve

References:

Stuffit Expander is probably on your hard drive somewhere; fire up Find or Sherlock and look for "expander." It is also available from Aladdin Systems new Stuffit Web site at:

http://www.stuffit.com/mac/index.html

DropStuff is also probably on your hard drive; search for "dropstuff" and see where it might be hiding. DropStuff is also available as part of Stuffit Deluxe or Stuffit Standard, both of them available from the Stuffit Web site.

Apple maintains an extensive glossary of computer terms at:

http://www.apple.com/education/technicalresources/glossary.html