BCRA > Publications > Speleology > Guidelines > Format for submissions

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Format for Submissions

This web page contains some early draft information, which has not changed substantially since January 2003. Is is probably due for some slight revisions.

Words per Page

The word count, per page, is about 1500 for a full page of text in three columns. For the four-column pages (e.g. some of the overseas book reviews) it is about 1700 words. These figures are obviously diminished by headings, photos and so on. For a one page article with a photo, you can expect it to be about 1200 words; for a two page article with two photos, perhaps 1500 words.

Tips for Writers

• Separate your text into manageable paragraphs. Read it through. Give it to a friend to read.
• Check all proper names - especially foreign ones. Be consistent. If you spell the name of a foreign cave, mountain, person, town inconsistently, how will we know which is the correct spelling?
• Distances should be in metric units. No space between the figure and the unit, e.g. "35m", "45km".
• Figures less than ten should be spelt out. "Three months", not "3 months".
• Do not use double spaces after full stops.
• Expedition reports: try to follow the format of an existing report from Speleology.

Format for files

The preferred format for text is either a plain text file (*.txt) or, if you need to include non-ascii characters (e.g. Greek symbols, accents, super/sub-scripts) then MS Word 97 (or earlier) or RTF. If you include any character style modifications in an MS Word document, such as italic, bold, etc., you should also try to send a paper copy with these items highlighted. Note: it is not necessary for you to apply any formatting to your MS Word document since all formatting and embellishments will be stripped out when the text is imported into my editing package.

Documentation

It is very helpful if you can include with your submission an index to all the files you are supplying. For example, say what the photo files are called and what the appropriate caption should be (and who to credit). Say which files contain the surveys, and so on.

Headings

If in doubt about headings, please follow the practice in Speleology or Cave & Karst Science. Headings and sub-headings are needed to break up the text but too many headings can be confusing. If you are submitting unformatted ascii text, please number your headings (e.g. 1.3.2 etc), but note that numbered headings will not be used in the final text. In MS Word, please use styles for headings. Do not use more than three levels of headings.

Information for Book Reviews

For book reviews we normally like to receive a scan of the front cover, and as much of the following information as you can provide. (Please list this information, one item per line, at the start of the review.

• Title of Book or Journal
• Author
• City of Publication (for books, not essential for periodicals)
• Publisher(for books, not essential for periodicals)
• Year of Publication
• Price (& currency, state hardback or paperback version)
• ISBN or ISSN
• Number of Pages (follow usual convention for listing index & appendices; state if text in in a foreign language, e.g. "xiv + 34pp + index, in Polish with English summaries.")
• Illustrations (give number and type; go into as much detail as you think appropriate or can be bothered! (e.g. "15 area maps (mostly colour), 19 surveys, 24 colour photos, tables of deepest/longest caves.")
• Reviewer
• Availability (if item is not available in shops, where can it be obtained? Please state if your review copy has been deposited in the national caving library)

Equations, Tables and Other Additions to the Text

Equations: These should be kept to a minimum, but if you need to include any mathematical or chemical equations please insert these in the text using MS Equation in MS Word, or supply them on a separate piece of paper. It is not necessary for you to consider the font sizes used in MS Equation.

Tables: Do not include these in the text, although you can include a caption for the table if you like, and the words "Table 1 - to be inserted". Please supply tables in a separate file. In plain text files, please separate columns using a single tab character. In MS Word, please use the Table facility but do not worry about formatting the text - the main thing is to have the data in an unambiguous layout that we cannot misinterpret.

Graphs and Diagrams: Do not include these in the text, although you can include a caption if you like, and the words "Figure 1 - to be inserted"

Photographs

Photos of caves, people, equipment; scans of the covers of journals and books for review - all of this helps to make the magazine more interesting and helps to break up the text into manageable chunks. Inside the magazine there will probably only be monochrome photos, but the front and rear covers will contain colour.

Digital Cameras: Low-resolution digital photos do not reproduce well in magazines. Your digital camera may well be easy to handle and produce some great shots for your web site, or for 'home' printing, but if you are going to use it to take photos for sub-mission to magazines then you must…

• buy a decent-sized memory card (or some spares)
• shoot at the highest-possible resolution
• download to a portable storage device to free up memory space

As a rough guide, we need photos that have a resolution of 350 dots per inch (dpi) at the final reproduced size. In other words, if the photo is to be printed at a width of 90mm (3.5in), it must be 1200 pixels wide, suggesting an overall image size of around a megapixel. By extension, a quarter-megapixel shot will only reproduce at up to 45mm (1.8in) wide. If you want to shoot an image that is to be printed at 180mm wide (7in) then -ideally - you need to be using a 4Mpixel camera with a very low JPEG compression. In practice, we can squeeze quite a bit more out of the image than this - but we do need some leeway for cropping and to cope with the artifacts introduced by JPEG compression. If your camera only produces a JPEG output then you must use the minimum possible compression. If this is not possible then you may need to use an increased resolution to compensate for the losses.

If you do not have a scanner yourself, you might find that your local college or university has a "media services" department. In the larger cities there are a number of bureaux that offer professional photographic and media services who can also scan your material. They tend, however, to be expensive. High-street photographers such as Jessops will scan negatives and slides, but please request this to be of the highest resolution possible - you may have to pay a surcharge for this, but they are generally quite cheap to begin with.

Film Cameras: 35mm film is still a very good medium to use! If you decide to scan your photos and send in a CD-ROM then be warned that large scans can cause a problem as well as small scans; but that's only because the editor's computer has run out of disc space. A full colour image that is around 12Mb uncompressed is probably about the right size for a 180mm-wide reproduction. This equates to about 1800dpi on a film scanner.

If you need to send photos through the post, please package them very well. Prints are easily bent; slide mounts easily crack. Please send all material by registered post and we will refund your expenses. All material is sent at your own risk and, although every care will be taken, we cannot guarantee that it will remain undamaged. (E.g. if we take it to an agency for scanning they might lose it - it has been known!).

Processing of digital scans:

• You should submit all scans as TIFF files if possible
• Submit scans in colour - please do not convert them to monochrome
• Please do not "tweak" any scans - e.g. to sharpen them
• Do not send files that are too large or too small
• If your scan proves difficult to work with then we might have to ask to borrow the original material.

Line Drawings and Diagrams

Similar arguments to the above apply to the reproduction of line drawings, surveys and so on, but these need a resolution of at least 600dpi at the final size, and preferably 1200dpi. A full-page survey can therefore be a large file. A small screen-capture from your graphics package, or a JPEG file (with its lossy compression) will probably be totally inadequate. The following notes may help you if you want to submit a digital image. You can, of course, submit on paper, but it needs to be neat!

Vector v. Bit-map

For all graphs and diagrams, a 'vector' format is preferred to a 'bitmap'. There are many different graphics formats and we are unlikely to be able to read them all, so it is essential that you contact us well in advance. CorelDraw is a suitable package for diagrams; or other packages that allow you to export a WMF (Windows metafile). Various CAD packages will provide suitable output, but please check in advance or submit in plenty of time!

Bitmap Resolution

If you have to send a bitmap (as opposed to a vector file), please note that it should have a resolution of at least 600 dpi and preferably 1200dpi.

Shading

There are issues to do with the shading of bitmaps that make it advisable not to use shading unless you have to. (Essebntially, a shaded digram has to be supplied at a high resolution, so the file sizes can be very large).

Embedded Graphics

Please do not embed graphics in your document, nor use the functions on Microsoft Word's Draw toolbar. Please do not use MS Word's built-in drawing facilities (ie. autoshapes, text boxes and MS Draw) because these do not reliably reproduce across different computers. It is OK as a last resort, or for an early draft, but we may have to re-draw anything you supply this way.

Size of Diagrams

Graphics should be drawn to be a whole number of columns wide - 58mm, 122mm or 185mm.

Line Width and Font Sizes

Please do not use a "hairline" line width, as this generally reproduces at a printer-default of one pixel wide, which is too narrow. The minimum line width should be at least 0.5 pt wide (that's 0.007", 0.2mm, or 4 pixels @ 600dpi) at final size. Type generally should not exceed 10 pt nor be smaller than 6 pt in the final version; 8 pt type is preferred.

Suggestions for Cave Surveys

If you produce your survey entirely electronically please ensure that it meets the above requirements. A common method of producing a survey is to plot the centre line using Survex or a similar package, then to hand-draw the passage detail. This is acceptable, but please draw the survey as large as possible so that it can be scanned to a high detail. If you wish to add the lettering by computer, consider the following procedure.

1. Scan your survey at a low resolution, but to an exact scale
2. Read the scan into Coreldraw at an exact scale
3. Add whatever text and lettering you require, using Coreldraw
4. If you want to trace over the survey using Coreldraw's line drawing facilities, that's fine. You can delete the scanned survey when done or - preferably - move it to another drawing layer so you can 'hide' or 'view' it
5. Send us the completed file, and either the paper survey or a high-resolution scan. We can then combine your lettering with a high-resolution drawing to produce the final result. Clearly the important thing here is to get the scale right so everything lines up.

There are obviously many ways of drawing a cave survey - many proprietary packages and preferred methods of working. It would be good if someone felt like taking on a project to summarise readily-available methods!

David Gibson June 2003