Handy Guidebook for Authors

Chicago Guide To Preparing Electronic Manuscripts: For Authors and Publishers. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987. 156 pp. $25 HB. $9.95 PB Any scientist who is writing a book should be aware of this nifty guide on how to format a manuscript using a word processor or computer. The conventional publishing process requires a typesetting house to re-key all of the manuscript. Clearly, if the author's keystrokes can be captured in some way, there should be savings of time and cost. In practice this is difficult to achieve for all sorts of reasons: incompatibilities of hardware and software, inconsistent keying by the author, inexperience on the part of authors and their publishers, and the fact that a carefully designed package of conventional type uses a range of font styles and sizes. The editors at the University of Chicago Press have produced an excellent set of instructions for authors and their publishers, If the guidelines provided in these pages are followed closely, authors can give publishers disks or tapes that can be used directly to produce a typeset proof. Most scientists do, in fact, produce their typescripts using computers. Almost all printing now is done from an image produced by a computerized typesetter. Thus the goal is to match the author's magnetic medium to the typesetting computer. The basic principles for achieving this seem surprisingly simple. In order to overcome the incompatibiities of a huge range of systems, authors use a generic coding system that is easy to learn. At the printer these codes are interpreted so that the various text elements, such as subheadings or captions, are identified and then correctly set. For example, the code (ct) denotes that the text immediately following is a chapter title, (i) tells the computer to switch to italic and (alpha) and (OMEGA) are lower and upper case Greek. Some standard typesetting techniques play havoc with electronic manuscripts, and the guide explains these. New paragraphs must be indicated consistently in just one of three ways. Using a tab in some parts of the book and a variable number of spaces in others as paragraph beginnings would make it impossible for the typesetter to produce a quality proof. Underlining to indicate italic also has to be avoided. The editors explain how electronic manuscripts are altering techniques of copyediting. One feature of the new approach is that the author generally has to incorporate the changes to the electronic medium for the publisher. Another is that it may be possible to produce the index automatically. An advantage of all this to authors is that they have much greater control over the final page proof. Although proofreading must still be done, the density of mistakes should be much lower than with a conventional proof. The advice in this guide can be put into practice for manuscripts that do not have equations, many special symbols or a proliferation of tables. The guide does not cover the preparation of camera-ready or laser-printed copy, and I suspect that publishers will soon need to address the lack of standards in that area. Nevertheless, anyone who is producing a book on a computer should be aware of the contents of this invaluable guide, which collects the results of five years' experience in handling electronic manuscripts. Mitton, who trained as an astronomer, is editorial director for science publishing at Cambridge University Press, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK. With Jacqueline Mitton he wrote Invitation to Astronomy, which was published by Basil Blackwell from word processor disks.

Handy Guidebook for Authors

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