Guidelines for Vector authors

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 158

Small Stuff (SusMemb News etc.)¶

This can come over the mailbox just as plain text embedded in your message. Use [] or quad- as a placeholder for quad, and some sensible transliteration of the APL symbols such as rho. If you want your formatting to survive (italic and bold for example) save the text from Word in Rich Text Format (file extension .RTF) and just append this to the message. I can quickly swipe the obvious bit with the mouse, copy it into an empty file, and open the result in Word. This seems quite reliable, but I believe there are limits on message length, so don’t try it with a complete article!

Articles which are mostly text (or J)¶

I still prefer these with as little formatting as possible. I normally start by stripping stuff back to plain text anyway, as otherwise I get unexpected side-effects, such as your italics appearing in Century Schoolbook Italic (because that was the font you started in) rather than Palatino. J authors can help a lot by surrounding J code with obvious markers such as <<a =. i. 12>> — I can quickly knock up a Word macro to reformat the bits in between, and then remove the markers. APL is much easier to spot, and I am quite happy to read the text through and format this by hand.

Heavy Windows stuff with lots of Bitmaps¶

This really has to be Write or Winword (2 not 6 at the moment please). If possible, ask me for a copy of VECTOR.DOT before you start, and write the article based on Vector’s template. Please check that the page size is A4. This way you have full control over page breaks (so your pictures go where you want them) and your special effects (tables, bordered paragraphs, sections in double-column and so on) will survive.

Failing this, please keep it simple! Use Heading1 for top headings, Heading2 for subheads, Normal for everything else. DO NOT USE FORMAT CHARACTER TO CHANGE THE NORMAL FONT. Use format style define and set it there! I can cope with all known APL TrueType fonts, but please be consistent if possible, or mark clearly what is from Dyalog and what is from PLUS and what is from ISIWIN. CompuServe seems totally reliable, but for anything large, a disk in the post is cheaper and can be wrapped in a paper copy ‘just in case’.