Guidelines for Publishing Partners
From MPublishing
Below you will find recommendations for MPublishing's publishing partners on how best to provide us with your content for publication. By following these directions, you will help us keep errors to a minimum and allow us to continue offering low-cost publishing services with a fast turnaround time. If you have any questions about these guidelines, please do not hesitate to ask your contact person at MPublishing.
Instructions will vary based on the format of your electronic publication. However, there are a few things all publications have in common:
- Filenames: Your contact at MPublishing can provide you with information on how to name your files for sending to us.
- Timelines: Please keep us informed of when you plan to get your documents to us. The more predictable your schedule is and the more advance notice we have, the better we'll be able to schedule the work on our end.
- Batches: Because of our conversion workflow, we prefer to convert an entire issue (or full set of documents) all at once rather than article by article.
Guidelines for publications with page images
The guidelines in this section only apply to publications that display page images.
Sending us your documents
Documents can be sent can be sent:
- as email attachments (except for the following exceptions blocked by Google Apps)
- by mail on CD, DVD, hard drive, by file transfer protocol (FTP or SFTP)
- by a file-transfer service or file sharing service
Your contact person at MPublishing can provide you with additional information on all of these options.
Revisions and final changes
MPublishing will let you preview the new documents before the website is released to users, so you will have an extra chance to proof for errors at that time.
File formats
In order of preference, we can accept:
- PDF/A files
- other types of PDF files generated from electronic source documents.
- Bitonal TIFF files of scanned page images with a resolution of at least 600ppi.
- Bitonal TIFF files of scanned page images with a resolution of at least 150ppi.
- PDF files composed of scanned page images.
- Other scanned page images with a resolution of at least 150ppi.
- Paper copies which can be unbound during scanning and recycled after scanning.
- Paper copies which must be returned to you.
Guidelines for publications with digital text
The guidelines in this section are for publications that display digital text.
For monographs, for matters of style, including capitalization, abbreviation, notes, and bibliography, consult The Chicago Manual of Style.
Sending us your documents
Documents can be sent:
- as email attachments (except for the following exceptions blocked by Google Apps, which MPublishing staff use for email)
- by mail on CD, DVD, or hard drive, by file transfer protocol (FTP or SFTP)
- by a file-transfer service or file sharing service
Your contact person at MPublishing can provide you with additional information on all of these options. The mailing address is:
Digital Publishing Production
MPublishing
4186 Shapiro Library
919 S. University Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1185
Your whole text (of the article or monograph) should be sent as one document, with components (forward, preface, etc.) in the order in which you would like them to appear online.
File formats
We can accept files in many formats and will recommend a format for you depending on the specifics of your publication.
Revisions and final changes
Please send only final versions of files.
If you discover a change that must be made after you have sent files to us, please contact us promptly. We will advise you at that time on whether to send us replacement files (if we have not yet had a chance to begin ingesting the content), a paper copy with changes noted, a Word document with corrections marked using the "track changes" feature, or a list of changes.
MPublishing will let you preview the new documents before the website is released to users, so you will have an extra chance to proof for errors at that time.
Tips for creating documents that can be easily published online
- Never use a line break (often created by typing Ctrl + Enter) when you mean to use a paragraph break (Enter). Our conversion ignores all line breaks since they are typically used to override word spacing for a particular print layout.
- Never use spaces, tab stops, or indentation to achieve layout.
- For bulleted or numbered lists, use the list feature in your program for all items in the list rather than typing numbers (or inserting bullets) by hand to fix numbering.
- If you insert foreign characters or words, use a Unicode font rather than a pre-Unicode font like Symbol.
- If you use subheadings, be sure these are distinguished by a change in font rather than simply by a carriage return separating the main heading and the subheading.
- When articles contain hyperlinks to external resources, please provide the complete link, rather than a redirect created by a URL shortening service like TinyURL or bit.ly.
- Avoid citation styles that use print conventions designed for brevity, such as "Ibid." and em dashes to indicate a repeated author. These are difficult for citation linking software to interpret.
- Use the bold and italics features of the word-processing or desktop-publishing application, not a special font whose name includes "Italic" or "Bold" in it.
Microsoft Word documents
- Make sure that there are no comments, annotations, or hidden text whatsoever in the final version of the manuscript. In addition, make sure that all "tracked changes" or other revision marks have been accepted as final (i.e., there should be no revision marks, hidden or otherwise, in the final manuscript).
- Do not use Word's "bookmark" feature.
- Turn off automatic hyphenation and delete all optional hyphens used to break words across lines.
- If your text includes hyperlinks, these should be real Word hyperlinks. (If you hover over them in Word, the URL pops up.) Alternatively, if you are satisfied with having the URL displayed inline but also want this URL to be clickable when published online, the URL needs to be surrounded by angle brackets or square brackets without any other special formatting.
- Use Word's footnote feature to create footnotes or endnotes rather than putting these in the body of the document. You can use both in the same document, but they will all be renumbered in the order they appear in the text as endnotes.
Page layout programs: Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, QuarkXPress, etc.
- Page layout programs use "story boxes" to structure chunks of text. These boxes can be linked together so that text flows from one box to another. Be sure to use only one box for an entire journal article or other unitary text. If there is a diagram or figure in the middle of the text, the text should flow around this object.
- Create hyperlinks as in Microsoft Word (see above), except keep in mind that only embedded hyperlinks in Microsoft Publisher will convert correctly. Hyperlinks in other programs should display the URL inline, as is an option for Word (see above).
Tables, images, and multimedia content
If your article contain tables, charts, figures, photos, or multimedia content, you could embed these in your Word, InDesign, or other files used for a digital text publication. You will almost certainly need to do this if you are creating PDF files for MPublishing for delivery online (see below).
To ensure maximum fidelity to the originals of this non-textual content, it is best if you can send the original non-text files to MPublishing as well.
Tables
Tables should be constructed in Word or InDesign if at all possible rather than inserted as images. If you must use an image of a table, send as a separate file. If you are not creating PDF files for MPublishing, insert a placeholder in the text such as "[Table 1 here ]".
Charts
If an article contains a chart, please include a description of the chart so all users, including those with visual impairments, can access the information. The description should be labeled "Description" and be inserted directly following the chart.
Images
If you are not creating PDF files for MPublishing, you may choose not to embed non-text content in your Word files. In this case, insert placeholders like "[Image #1 goes here]" in the proper locations.
Images (or their placeholders) should be placed near the point in the text at which they are discussed. Never insert images in the middle of a sentence: it's disruptive to readers, and we cannot reproduce this online anyway. For this reason, it is usually best to insert an image between paragraphs.
Please include captions as text within the Word files, immediately following the image, instead of within the image itself in order to make the captions searchable and usable by visually impaired users.
If your publication displays images in only one or two sizes, without any zooming features, your image should be no taller than 650 pixels so that it will fit on the screen in common screen resolutions. If you have access to image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop, use optimization features like "save for web" that optimizes for on-screen viewing. Please send files in PNG (.png), JPEG (.jpg), or GIF (.gif) format.
If your publication displays images in a pop-up window with zooming features, you can send images in any size and in any format.
Multimedia
If an article contains a media object such as audio or video, please indicate in your text where that object should be shown to users with a placeholder such as "[Video 1 here]".
Placeholders should be placed near the point in the text at which they are discussed. Never insert them in the middle of a sentence: it's disruptive to readers, and we cannot reproduce this online anyway. For this reason, it is usually best to insert an image between paragraphs.
If the article contains audio content, it must contain a text transcript of the audio for deaf and hard-of-hearing users following the placeholder for the audio content.
If the article contains video, it must contain both captions and either a text or audio description of the video following the placeholder for the media object.
PDF files
When creating PDF files, create PDF/A files if possible. If this is not possible, at least embed fonts in the file. This will ensure that the files look the same when viewed on other computers.
Accessory information: keywords, abstracts, author bios, issue titles, etc.
Each digital object that we publish has associated metadata that helps users find it. While every item has a title and author (or editor), only some of them have information like keywords, abstracts, author bios, issue titles, volume and issue numbers, and page numbers. All metadata should be included in the source documents. Note that we are not able to represent bold, italics, and other font effects in all parts of our publishing system.
In a print document, metadata typically appears at the beginning or end of a text, or in running headers or footers. You should feel free to continue these conventions in source documents given to MPublishing. Since running headers and footers are not preserved in conversion from Word or page layout programs, any information recorded here should also appear at the beginning of the body as well to ensure that it displays properly.
If you send MPublishing a separate document for each article and have not been given a filenaming scheme by your contact at MPublishing, be sure to specify the order in which the articles should appear in the virtual table of contents for the issue.
Fonts and non-English text
MPublishing can publish content not in English but only using characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode, which includes characters for nearly all modern languages and many historical characters.
Avoid use of Unicode's ligature and digraph characters since these interfere with searching of documents. Instead, your documents should include each individual character.
Authors should only enter text into their word processor document by copying and pasting from websites or by typing directly in Word using a foreign keyboard layout. Authors should only use fonts that come with their operating system (not any special fonts they have to download).
To verify that these characters display in browsers by default, check the test pages for Unicode character ranges.
