Running an electronic journal

2.1. 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.

2.2. 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.

3.1. Editing for content

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3.2. Editing for style

This requires strict attention and a careful, disciplined approach. It also needs some knowledge of the demands placed on typography by the various output formats (Web, PDF, eBook, etc).

You must have a thorough knowledge and understanding of your publication's stylesheet. Editing the use of Named Styles is very simple, but it requires the ability to spot what authors intended, and correct their abuse of styles. There will always be those authors who consider themselves above such discipline, and those who have a fixation about the rightness of their personal idea of formatting. Both are entirely wrong when writing for someone else (ie, your journal), and the editor's job is to mend the damage these attitudes causes to the author's own work and to the publication.

Each major style element is known as a ‘paragraph’ style (the ‘character’ styles are dealt with in the penultimate paragraph in section 3.2.3 ‘Back matter’ ). Your journal's stylesheet will contain a mix of compulsory elements and optional elements. The compulsory ones are ‘metadata’ (information about the article)

3.2.1. Metadata (‘front matter)’

These elements are compulsory:

• Title (one only!)
• Author (one or more)
• Affiliation (one or more, in pairs with each Author)

The optional elements are:

• Series (containing the series name, eg ‘Review’, ‘Editorial’, ‘Opinion’, etc, used for classification)
• Subtitle (immediately following the Title)
• Abstract (one or more styled paragraphs like this will be grouped together and automatically given the ‘Abstract’ heading)
• Epigraph
• EpiCite (for an attribution immediately after the Epigraph)

Figure 1. Editing an article using named styles

Example document - Wordprocessor

FileEditViewInsertFormatTableToolsWindowHelp

Series	Article	Styles ⊠ Series Title Subtitle Author Affiliation Epigraph EpiCite Heading Normal Abstract Appendix Bibliography BlockQuote BlockQuoteCite Caption Heading1 Heading2 Heading3 ListBullet ListContinue ListLabel ListNumber ListPara Plain Reference Text WebText Citation Footnote
Title	The Mathematical Analysis of Logic
Subitle	Being an essay towards a calculus of deductive reasoning
Author	George Boole
Affiliation	University College Cork
Epigraph	Έπικοινοῦσι δὲ πᾶσαι αἱ ἐπιστῆμαι ἀλλήλαιϛ κατὰ τὰ κοινά. Κοινὰ δὲ λέγω, οἶϛ χρῶνται ὡϛ ἐκ τούτων ἀποδεικνύντεϛ· ἀλλ᾽ οὐ περὶ ὧν δεικνύουσιν, οὐδε ὃ δεικνύουαι.
EpiCite	Aristotle, Anal. Post., lib. i. cap. xi.
Heading	Preface
Normal	In presenting this Work to public notice, I deem it not irrelevant to observe, that speculations similar to those which it records have, at different periods, occupied my thoughts. In the spring of the present year my attention was directed to the question then moved between Sir W. Hamilton and Professor De Morgan; and I was induced by the interest which it inspired, to resume the almost-forgotten thread of former inquiries. It appeared to me that, although Logic might be viewed with reference to the idea of quantity,* it had also another and a deeper system of relations. If it was lawful to regard it from without, as connecting itself through the medium of Number with the intuitions of Space and Time, it was lawful also to regard it from within, as based upon facts of another order which have their abode in the constitution of the Mind. The results of this view, and of the inquiries which it suggested, are embodied in the following Treatise.
Footnote	See p. 43.

To edit with named styles in Microsoft Word you need to a) turn on the Style Margin; and b) turn on the Style List

3.3. Copyediting (typographic editing)

Some of these are quite subtle, and are easily missed by the unpractised eye. What follows is a list of hints and tips that will help bring your articles up to publication standard. Remember that authors are not typesetters, and may have very little experience or understanding of consistency, logic, or structure, no matter how famous or authoritative they may be in their own field. Some of the characters mentioned may be unfamiliar to you (see the table ‘Special characters mentioned in this section’ in the list in this section below).

Dashes and hyphens

The hyphen (-) is used to connect two words in a compound, for example ‘a long-held belief’. It should never be used for any other purpose. It is frequently misused for the long dash—​called an ‘em dash’ or ‘em rule’ by printers—​with or without the spaces (an em is a printer's measure of width).

Replace all occurrences of a hyphen preceded or followed by one or more spaces with a consistent dash: either just an em dash alone (no spaces) or an em dash with a non-breaking space before it and a normal space after it (the reason being that when the text is reformatted, you don't ever want a line to be broken at the space before a dash, whereas a line-break after a dash looks OK).

There are two exceptions: a) a hyphen between two digits (like ‘87-93’) should be replaced with an ‘en dash’, which is shorter than an em dash but longer than a hyphen, like ‘87–93’. This is the only place that an en dash should be used; and b) in mathematics, the hyphen is never used: replace them with real minus signs, as in 87−93=−6.

Some older authors may use a colon followed by a hyphen or dash to precede a list:- like that. Remove the hyphen or dash: the colon alone is sufficient.

Ellipsis

This is the three-dot ‘leader’ which is used to indicate an uncompleted sentence, a suspension and resumption of an argument, or [in brackets] an omitted word or phrase.

An ellipsis is a single character, not three separate full stops (periods)…the spacing is different. Most wordprocessors automatically convert three full stops into an ellipsis, but some authors type many more than three, and some systems don't do the conversion properly.

Change all multiple full stops into single ellipses.

Ampersands

The ampersand is the ‘and’ sign (&) and should never occur in normal text. The exceptions are a) some bibliographical citation formats which use it to separate author names; and b) some compound acronyms like AT&T

Change all other & signs in normal text to ‘and’.

In Irish, use a real ocus sign (⁊) not a digit 7. This is also known as the Tironian ‘Et’ or the Insular Ampersand.

Table 1. Special characters mentioned in this section

Character	Glyph	Code	Usage	Windows shortcut	Mac OS X shortcut	Linux shortcut
Em dash	—	2014	Long dash between phrases	Alt+0+1+5+1	Shift+Option+-	Shift+AltGr+-
En dash	–	2013	Range dash between numbers	Alt+0+1+5+0	Option+-	AltGr+-
Minus sign	−	2212	Mathematical minus
Ellipsis	…	2026	Point of suspension	Alt+0+1+3+3		AltGr+:
Ocus sign	⁊	204A	Irish ampersand
Non-breaking space	␣	2423	Normal space displayed, but line will never break here	Alt+0+1+6+0 or (Word) Ctrl+Shift+Space
Left single open-quote	‘	2018			Option+]
Right single close-quote	’	2019			Shift+Option+]
Left double open-quote	“	201C			Option+[
Right double close-quote	”	201D			Shift+Option+[

Other characters can be obtained by pressing your system's Unicode Selector keys and typing the character code.

• Windows: type the hexadecimal Unicode character code and press Alt+X.

• Mac: hold down Option (Alt) and type the hexadecimal Unicode character code. You need to enable this first with System PreferencesLanguage & TextInput Sources and Unicode Hex Input keyboard layout)

• Linux: hold down Ctrl+Shift+U (an underlined u will appear) and type the hexadecimal Unicode character code.

Full stops (periods)

There must never be a full stop (period) at the end of a title or a heading. Delete them.

Acronyms

Remove full stops (periods) from acronyms: that is, use IBM, not I.B.M.

Superscripted ordinals

Never use superscripts for ordinals: use 36th, not 36^th. Especially do not allow italics as well as superscripting, like 36^th.

Remove superscript and italicisation from all ordinal numbers. You should turn off auto-superscripting on your machine permanently.

Superscripting and italicisation of ordinals was a foible of Victorian typography which persisted until WWII. It lingered longer in the USA and was re-introduced to Americans by Microsoft under the mistaken impression that it looked cute or cool. It doesn't.

Underlining

Underlining was used in the days of typewriters because italics were not available. It is never used in typesetting.

Replace all underlining in normal text by italics.

There are two exceptions: a) in some disciplines, the underline is used as a special signal in symbolic notations (linguistics and mathematics, mostly); and b) some bibliographical citation formats which use it to indicate the volume, issue, or page numbers in certain types of reference.

URIs (web addresses) should never be manually underlined by an author (they may get automatically underlined by a browser, but that is not the author's responsibility).

Empty paragraphs

Paragraphs containing no text are simply ignored when publishing, regardless of any style name they may have. Space between paragraphs is determined by the web browser and the CSS styles for the journal, not by adding empty paragraphs. Empty paragraphs may interfere with the deductive mechanism of the publishing process, and should normally be deleted.

For example, a figure needs to be followed immediately by its caption. Adding an empty paragraph for spacing (apart from being meaningless and unnecessary, because the web stylesheet will do its own spacing) may prevent the program seeing the caption at all, because it is not the immediate next element after the figure.

Line-breaks

Some authors try to force a premature line-break by starting a new paragraph, and giving it the same style as the preceding one. This will not work, because now there are two styled paragraphs instead of one. In the case of a Title, for example, there would now be two titles, which is nonsense.

To force a premature line-break, join the two paragraphs together again, and use the InsertBreakLine break menu item to break the line.

Apostrophes and quotes

Most wordprocessors automatically convert pairs of typewriter quotes '…' and "…" to curly (typographic) quotes like ‘this’ and “that”.

Beware of unmatched single quotes like “…in the ‘20s” where the wordprocessor has failed to see that it should be an apostrophe like “…in the ’20s”, not an open-quote. Change these to apostrophes.

In Irish surnames, the patronymic marker O’ in the English form must never be followed by a space; in the Irish form Ó it must always have a space after it, preferably a non-breaking space. Similarly, Mc and Mac in English forms must never take a space (whereas Mac, mac, and ó in Irish forms always do), and the Mc must never be represented by M‘ or M^c except when quoting from a source. The other markers Ua, Uí, Í, Ní, and Nic all take a space.