As you prepare your electronic manuscript, please keep the following guidelines in mind for efficient page assembly and text portability:
- Remember that the simpler your document is assembled, the easier it will be for the designer to use. Avoid adding unnecessary type characteristics or other desktop-publishing features that may be unusable in systems used for publishing.
- Keep your text pages simple and consistent using:
—double spacing
—consistent margins
—hard returns only when needed (e.g. ends of headings and paragraphs)
—double hard returns between paragraphs
- Start all copy at the left margin including quotations, titles, and subheads. Do not center headings or indent quoted material using tabs or spaces.
- Use left justification throughout your manuscript. The words on your printout should form a “ragged” edge on the right margin.
- Begin every paragraph on the left margin, with one line space between paragraphs. Do not indent the first line of a new paragraph with a tab or space bar.
- Type all titles and headings using both uppercase and lowercase letters instead of all capital letters.
- If you want to emphasize a word in your manuscript, use italics or boldface instead of capital letters.
- When there are special manuscript features (such as poetry), use the tab key for indentations, not the space bar.
- Use hyphens only when the correct spelling of a word includes a hyphen. Our equipment will hyphenate words at the end of lines automatically.
- Enter only one space, not two, between sentences.
- Use the appropriate key for each character. For example, do not use the letter “l” for the numeral 1 or the letter “O” for the numeral 0.
- Instead of using footnotes, place your reference information at the end of your chapter or session or compile the notes in a separate file.
- When saving your file, include appropriate extensions and for portability, don’t double-dot the file name (e.g. manuscript.edited.doc)
