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ToC

ToC2. How it works

Up to start of section2.1. From author to editor to publisher

Authors should prepare their articles using a stylesheet for their wordprocessor that you supply (see section 2.2, ‘Stylesheets’). If this is the first time they have written for your journal, they may not understand this, so you may have to edit their first contribution yourself.

When an article has been accepted for publication, you must ‘copy-edit’ it. This has nothing to do with copying (‘copy’ is a publishing term meaning ‘text’), but refers to stylistic tidying-up for publication to make sure the article conforms to your ‘house style’.

This involves rigorously cleaning up sloppy punctuation, illogical sectioning, bogus list-numbering, errant footnoting, cross-referencing that doesn't refer to anything, and illustrations (both tables and figures) that are in unusable formats, and making sure everything is labelled accurately, using exclusively the named styles in your template (stylesheet). There must be nothing in the document that is not labelled with a style name. See Editing Word files for publication for help and suggestions.

Once an article has been edited into shape, you can upload it to the publishing server and mark it for testing. This makes it available to you as editor, but it is not visible to the public. You will be able to see the document as it would look when published, but with all the style names displayed so that you can check that everything is as it should be. If there are errors, you can simply correct them in your master copy and upload the file again.

Finally, when all articles for the issue have been edited and tested, you can publish them simultaneously, which makes the issue available to the public.

Up to start of section2.2. Stylesheets

A stylesheet is a list of formatting details, with names for each format (eg ‘Title’, ‘Abstract’, ‘Table’, etc). There are three stylesheets involved in the process:

  1. The wordprocessor stylesheet (Word or OpenOffice), which is designed to make it easy to write and edit documents. It is not the final printed or online style, because wordprocessors cannot accurately mimic either typesetting or a web browser, but it can be close. However, it must contain styles for all the component parts of an article, and each one must be named.

  2. The online stylesheet is an XSLT program that will be provided by the EPU. This contains the computer logic for applying your named styles to create a web page for the article in the layout you require. Remember that the web browser is not a piece of paper, so there are components of your articles which will look different on-screen (for example, footnotes).

  3. The print stylesheet is a LATEX document style that will also be provided by the EPU. This contains precise formatting instructions for typesetting to create the PDF versions of your articles for printing. Remember that a piece of paper is not a web browser, so there are components of your articles which will look different when printed from how thet appear on-screen.

Note that the EPU must have a pattern to work from for the online and print stylesheets: either layouts you make yourself, or ones that you have a designer create for you.

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