Jacket magazine - Jacket editorial style guide

Jacket is moving to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in late 2010. The new editors will be announcing their editorial and acceptance policies in late 2010. So, expect this page to change then.

[»] Tabs: no tabs or paragraph indents, please — use SPACEBAR characters instead

[»] How to send in corrections — don’t send the whole file, just the corrections

Jacket’s Editorial Policy

Jacket has a strict editorial policy of Peer Review. When Jacket editors John Tranter or Pam Brown receive a submission, they peer at it intently for a minute or two. If it looks okay — relevant, original, sparkly, fresh, thoughtful — they publish it. If it looks dull, conventional, derivative, obsequious, grovelling, cranky, or offensive, they throw it out. Okay?

Please do not send Jacket magazine any more books for review.

To save back and forth postage costs and an unworkable work load on our end, we now prefer to assess likely reviews from the publisher’s description of a book, and where appropriate seek out a likely reviewer. So we now ask publishers to send a BRIEF blurb to Jacket ( edit [åt] jacketmagazine [døt] cøm ) in machine-readable form, as an email attachment, i.e. as a Word doc file or a Word RTF file, or whatever, but NOT PDF please. When we find a reviewer, we can ask the publisher to mail the book directly to them.

Sending to Jacket

Submissions: I regret that I cannot accept unsolicited poetry contributions (except from writers I have asked before) — I don’t have the time or the space to handle them yet. I’m really sorry about this, but the Internet being what it is — an open line to hundreds of millions of rampant egos — I have to protect the time I have to spare for the magazine.

Anyone can submit a review, article or interview — but please send a 100-word synopsis first, with your return email address. Because Jacket is free, I regret that I cannot offer to pay for contributions.
Send Jacket an email, or send mail to

Jacket magazine
c/- Australian Literary Management
2-A Booth Street
Balmain NSW 2041
Australia

Your name: Please type your name at the top of your piece. But I really don’t need to remind you to do that, do I?

Copyright Notice (for Jacket readers): Please respect the fact that all material in Jacket magazine is copyright © Jacket magazine and the individual authors and copyright owners 1997–2009; it is made available without charge for personal use only, and it may not be stored, displayed, published, reproduced, or used for any other purpose.

Copyright Information (for Jacket authors and copyright owners): Jacket asks for single-use non-exclusive electronic world rights, in order to protect your rights from exploitation by others. You retain all copyright, and you may publish the work anywhere in any form at any time. You don’t have to ask Jacket’s permission: just do it. It would be nice if you mentioned previous appearance in Jacket.

Caveat: Jacket is free, and thus, unfortunately, unable to pay for contributions.

The Basics: how to format your submissions, briefly, in plain English.

Please format your work as simply as possible. I will do all the fancy typesetting that Jacket demands. This means:

Make your work look as simple as possible. We will format your piece to make it look attractive in Jacket; please don’t try to do that for us. If you make your piece look nice, with centered heading, bold sub-heading, and fancy fonts, we just have to take all this useless stuff out again, and we really don’t have any spare time for things like that.
Save and then Check your work: Save your writing as a Word DOC file (an RTF file is usually okay, though the Word DOC format seems to preserve footnotes better during the transfer to HTML).
Send your work: Don’t send your material inside an email: when you have checked your file carefully, send the file as an attachment to an email, not inside the body of the email.
Footnotes: please see the item below.
Use whatever typeface you like, but Times New Roman at around 12 point is a good safe choice.
Line-spacing: This doesn’t really matter. One and a half space is easily readable, but single space is okay.
‘Single’ or “double” quotes? My dear, I don’t give a damn.
Flush left, not justified.
Don’t use ALL CAPITALS anywhere in your piece. Rinse and Repeat: Don’t use ALL CAPITALS anywhere in your piece, especially not for the title.
Magazine and book titles are in italic, poem titles (when you are mentioning a poem in a review, say) are in “quotes”, and not bold or italic. Do not EVER use underline. Example:

John Ashbery’s poem ‘Two Scenes’ begins his first collection of poems, Some Trees, which was published in 1956.
Tabs: no tabs or paragraph indents, please. We prefer paragraphs NOT to be indented. Where you really do need to provide some space, use SPACEBAR characters instead.
Paragraphs: because text is so much harder to read on a computer screen, please provide a lot more paragraph breaks than you would for a print piece, and provide a blank line space between paragraphs. But please see the note headed “Paragraphs and quoted matter in prose articles” below.
When you send in corrections, just send a list of corrections. Do not send in the whole file again.
When you include a few lines of a quoted poem, don’t indent it. I’ll do that.
Now, please, read the rest of these guidelines slowly and carefully.

Footnotes

If you wish to employ footnotes or endnotes, please use a word processor that provides automatic proper footnotes and create your notes as footnotes, not endnotes. That is, when you read your piece on-screen, when you click on a footnote number, you should be taken to the footnote automatically. If you don’t know how to do that, try > Insert > Footnote, or ask a responsible adult.

In brief: do not create your notes as endnotes. Create them as automatic footnotes instead.

When you print out your typescript version of your paper, all the notes should appear as footnotes. But when your paper appears in Jacket, all the footnotes will be automatically converted to endnotes. Resign yourself to this fact. Why? See the next point:

There are no “pages” and thus no page breaks and thus no footnotes in HTML documents. A footnote is called a “foot”-note because it appears at the “foot” of a printed page, and there are no printed pages, and therefore no footnotes, in HTML. There are screen-fuls of text, but the text is actually in the form of a long scroll, which unrolls from top to bottom, a scroll without any page breaks. Because there are no “page foots”, there is nowhere for a footnote to go. Get your head around that. See this note.

Check your footnotes in Word DOC Format: Once you have saved your Jacket submission in Word’s DOC format (or similar) open it in that format and check that your footnoted text has numbers that link to the footnote, and numbers identifying the footnote that take you back to that footnote’s anchor in the text. If your word processor cannot do this, get one that can. The best ones are very cheap, or even free. See the next item.

Your Word-Processor: Use Quality Tools

Use a quality word processor. You wouldn’t respect a surgeon who used a rusty fishing knife instead of a scalpel, would you?

The Pure Mac site has a listing and brief descriptions of many word processors and text editors for the Apple Mac: http://www.pure-mac.com/textword.html

Wikipedia has a detailed technical comparison (useful if you know about operating systems) of dozens of word processors for all kinds of operating systems here.

The Donation Coder site here has a very detailed and sensible 2007 review of fourteen word processors:

Recommended word processors — by John Tranter.

Foreword

This started out as a helpful list of tips and turned into a rant. Thoughtful readers will gather from the text below that the only worthwhile word processors are the ones that specifically allow export of named paragraph styles, so the texts they produce can be used, massaged, and redesigned by other programs, such as Adobe Indesign, for beautiful books and printed magazines, and programs that convert styled RTF text (essays, etc) to clean HTML for use on the Net. But if you use Macintosh OS X, which it is said most graphics designers prefer, two of the three word processors which allow export of named paragraph styles both have grievous faults.

Microsoft Word is the profit-making product of an organisation convicted in US and European courts for criminal misuse of its monopoly powers, and the program itself is bloated and unstable.

The producers of OpenOffice Writer make the program available free of charge, and they design it to be very stable. In a general sense they seem to be decent and well-meaning people. But they also appear to be aesthetically challenged and unresponsive, and the program they supply for free is clumsy and sometimes difficult to use. A version (based on OpenOffice, and rewritten specifically for the Macintosh), Neo-Office, seems much faster (on the Macintosh) and more helpful, and it is also free.

Nisus Writer Pro allows export of named paragraph styles, at least to InDesign, seemingly without any serious problems.

Others: Scrivener is an excellent draft word processor for the Macintosh. (It is designed for first draft writing, not final draft polishing.) It stands out for speed, stability and typographical elegance but it has problems, partly because it relies on the uncouth and stumble-prone Macintosh OS X text engine for all the heavy lifting, and thus export named styles only with difficulty. If only today’s Apple designers cared as much about the text their computers produce as they used to a decade or so ago… I guess the profits they make from the toys and gadgets they sell have blinded them. Let’s hope it is temporary, and that the Mac OS X text engine is redesigned so that it works properly.

Scrivener (and Nisus Pro) create very clean RTF files, though, which include footnotes and other fancy bits, and they are very popular for that reason. I use them both frequently.

Mellel is an extremely elegant word processor, built for stability and long document use, and uses its own clever text engine. People have expressed some doubts about its ability to export DOC and RTF files perfectly, though, and it is difficult to learn.

Enough grumbling. Nisus Writer Pro, OpenOffice Writer (and Neo-Office) and Microsoft Word get five stars for providing their own text engines to allow for the export of named styled text in Mac OS X.

But What Does Jacket Want?

Poets often ask what is the best kind of word processor for sending poems to Jacket. It really doesn’t matter, as long as the program can provide RTF files (Rich Text Format) or Microsoft Word “doc” files. (Nisus is good at this.) Even plain text ASCII files are okay, as long as you indicate italics by using underscores _like this_, so the simplest text editing programs (like Notepad, TextEdit or BBEdit) can work too. It doesn’t matter what font you use, as long as it is easy to read and clear; whatever font you send us will be changed anyway. Times is a good choice, and Cambria is better, but anything will do. Caveats: 1) More recent file formats such as OpenOffice Writer ODT files, or Microsoft’s new DOCX files, are no good. 2) Please don’t use Tabs or Paragraph Indents to indent text: always use spacebars to indicate spaces instead. 3) Please read this style guide to the end.

Okay, What Does Jacket Use?

To convert a typed poem or essay into a Jacket page, I use a three programs one after the other, making strong use of macros. Files are imported into Nisus Writer Pro and converted to RTF format and run through a large and complicated macro which cleans up the typing. For example, double hyphens -- are converted into em dashes — like so; and so on. Nisus Writer Pro is particularly good here: the RTF format is extremely clean and precise, and the macros it allows you to write are based on PCRE: that is, Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions. Regular Expressions are the secret heart of text transformations, and Nisus Writer Pro makes them easy to employ.

Then the RTF file is processed through Logictran R2Net, which converts the RTF material into simple XHTML, using a few macros of its own.

Then that file is processed through BBEdit, a Mac-only text editing program that I have outfitted with dozens of macros I have written myself. This converts a page of typing into a page of beautiful XHTML, suitable for dropping into Jacket.

Free

I should say here that I have given up on OpenOffice Writer for Mac, in March 2010, because the current version crashes so often; at least on my machine. But read on. OpenOffice Writer works on Windows, Macintosh, Linux and several Unix-type systems, and comes as part of a substantial office suite. Writer used to be slow to open, as it has to get a large Java Virtual Machine running in the background, but once started, it is quick to move through a file. The latest version (3.1, 2010) is faster to open. And it can handle huge files with ease. The Donation Coder site says “Largest document capacity of any word processor tested: 65,535 pages saves to an XML file only 3.59 Mb in size.” Saves to ODF XML format, RTF format (with styles saved), Word format, Lyx and others. The version current in 2009 (version 3.1) was fairly quick, very stable and totally reliable, in my experience, but the Mac version for 2010 (version 3.2) seems to crash often, and the RTF files it saves are badly broken, especially where included graphics are used.

The computer engineering background of the program’s designers is evident in the power and stability of the program; also, unfortunately, in its lack of gracefulness. If you want to write a computer manual or a science text book, OpenOffice Writer will do fine. If you want to produce an attractive book of recipes, an anthology of poetry or a novel, you’re out of luck. It is typographically primitive. Stylish OpenType font attributes like true small caps, old style numerals and ligatures are ignored (except where the Mac system provides its own ligatures). Mellel and Nisus (see below) do much better here. Inserted graphics are awkward to move about and fine-tune. There is no useful “draft” format, and no “split-window” view, though users have been crying out for both for years. (You can use the full-screen view as a draft view, though that’s a kludge, and you can open a new window to imitate a split-window view, though that’s a worse kludge.) There is no easy way to change all the straight quotes in a long complex document to true typographers’ quotes. The Table of Contents feature is stable, but ugly in its basic form, and difficult to redesign and fine-tune. The rendering of text on the screen can be erratic.

And here is an example of a small but irritating design choice made by the OpenOffice team: some screenshot views of some combo boxes [»»]. (Well, it irritates me…) It shows a comparison of the relative usability of the provided combination box choices in OpenOffice Writer and Adobe InDesign: OpenOffice is the loser, but sadly their people are too busy fixing more important bugs to attend to it. And to be fair, Adobe is a larger, older and wealthier company with a reputation for good design which they have to protect. Here’s a note from a moderator on the OpenOffice Users’ Forum about this issue:

“This issue hasn’t received much comment in six years… No users have voted for the enhancement and very few have even commented on it. As a result It’s status is still ‘unconfirmed’. As long as there are real bugs to fix, It probably won’t get any attention unless users vote for the enhancement.”

What this means is that most of the users who write in to the development team and “vote for enhancements” — that is, the computer science graduates who develop OpenOffice — cannot actually notice the unattractive typography and the clumsy hyphenation. Why would they? After all, they are not employed because of their ability to dress well, to make elegant conversation or to design beautiful books and magazines. Sadly, that is not likely to change, as there is no economic driver to improve the end-user experience.

So think of this program as a free and slightly awkward way to produce a very plain-looking draft of your new project, and don’t expect much more from it. If you use a Mac, you are in luck: Neo-Office, the free Mac-specific version of OpenOffice, is very stable and easier to use.

But bless them for writing a text engine that exports named styles: if you need stylishness, that can be added in Adobe InDesign, which can import and improve the RTF or DOC files that OpenOffice Writer can produce. InDesign is built to handle sophisticated typography with ease and polish and to produce beautiful books and magazines (and I bet they dress well): it just costs a lot of money and produces huge files; really huge. See below.

Lotus Symphony is a twin of OpenOffice supported by IBM. In my experience, it is horribly slow and thus unusable. In a single word: Don’t.

NeoOffice Writer for the Macintosh: a free clone of OpenOffice Writer. I find the current version (march 2010) very fast, stable and pleasant to use.

AbiWord supports Microsoft Windows including Windows 2000, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, QNX, and BeOS. It will work on a Mac, just, but it looks awful. Small, fast but limited. In my opinion it needs more work.

Kword for Linux and several other operating systems: in my opinion it needs lots more work. The homepage has a clunky look, with vague claims about the program’s abilities: “KWord includes all the features you would expect from a modern word processor and more,” they say: “… styles, word count, page count, easy zooming and the comprehensive print preview to name a few.” Why a few? Why not name some more? What about footnotes and endnotes? How does it handle bibligraphies and does it offer integration with bibliographic software? Does it link to databases? How does it handle Tables of Contents? Kerning? Ligatures? Does it export named paragraph styles? We are not told, and on the homepage there’s no way you can find out. Recommendation: try something else. Anything else.

Good and Cheap

My current favorite is Nisus Writer Pro (Mac only) originally Nisus (pronounced “nice us.”) As of December 2007 it was available in two varieties: Nisus Writer Express, and Nisus Writer Pro. The Express version is good and cheap, the Pro version more complex and very promising. The program is valued, claims Wikipedia, by its users — especially serious users like book authors — for its reliability and unique features. I have used it every day now for about a year, and it has never crashed. Its native “save” format is the widely-used Rich Text Format, capable of being read by any word processor, and the RTF it saves is very clean. It can also save in lots of other formats. (Just to clarify things, Rich Text Format is a proprietary Microsoft format, and has been changed once or twice, so it is not as open as people think, but it is reasonably future-proof. If you don’t believe me, look it up in Wikipedia.)

Nisus Writer Pro has nearly every feature you could wish for, including a search and replace routine that varies from simple (Normal Find) to frighteningly powerful (PowerFind Pro with a regular expression engine): you choose what you need when you need it. And… a powerful and easy to use Macro engine. The program is not quite as feature-rich as OpenOffice, but this comes with the advantage of lightness and speed. It does export named styles to InDesign very capably. From my study of the helpful user’s forum, there only seems to be one serious problem: when handling very long files (hundreds of pages) with hundreds of footnotes, such as academic dissertations, the program can slow to a crawl. Mellel is equally stable and seems to be better for very long documents with hundreds of footnotes, but Mellel has its problems, too: notably erratic export to the RTF format often demanded by publishers.

Here’s what William Porter, at Macworld.com, has to say:

Nisus Writer, Express and Pro

For ordinary writing, Nisus Writer Pro and Nisus Writer Express are equally capable. Both have excellent writing environments with a variety of ways to view your writing. My favorite has always been full-screen view, which removes menus and buttons from the screen and leaves me alone with my thoughts; but there is a WYSIWYG page view and window-width draft view, if you prefer.

Both programs have excellent support for paragraph and character styles for formatting your text systematically. I am a bit confused by the way that style sheet view in Nisus Writer Express and Pro replaces document-editing view. I prefer Word’s approach, but Nisus Writer’s approach works, too. Both Express and Pro support page-layout basics such as multi-column sections, inline graphics and basic tables.

Add in powerful grep-based search tools, non-contiguous selection, support for non-Roman languages, basic macros, and the ability to create your own keyboard shortcuts for nearly every menu command, and either Nisus Writer Pro or Nisus Writer Express is a very attractive option for serious writers.

Scrivener: alas for Mac OS X only.A word processor designed by a writer for other writers, and designed for drafting large and complex projects (not for final typesetting or polishing). I love it, and so do thousands of others. Scrivener is a word processor and project management tool created specifically for writers of long texts such as novels and research papers. It won’t try to tell you how to write — it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application. It exports to RTF with footnotes and italic and bold type, though like other cheap Mac OS X word processors, it depends on Mac OS X's crippled Cocoa text engine, and does not export named styles. It is inexpensive. You can write an email to the courteous, friendly and smart English school-teacher who wrote the program, and he will answer you. Try that with Bill Gates!

TextMaker (Windows and Unix and Linux only) is part of the German-made SoftMaker office suite, and is very compatible with Word documents. It is fast, stable and reliable, and can handle huge files with ease. It is not expensive, and the academic edition is less than the price of a six-pack of beer. (Then again, a six-pack of beer is probably more fun.) Works on Windows, Windows CE and Windows Mobile, and Linux, but not Mac, and exports to RTF. As an aside, if you need a proper word processor for a Windows Mobile phone, this is the very best.

Mellel for MAC OS X only, is a commercial word processor marketed as especially suited for technical and academic writers. It has a steep learning curve, but it is immensely stable and reliable, with the best typographic control of any word processor. Footnotes? Mellel laughs at footnotes: it can handle ninety-nine different streams of footnotes in the one document! Saves to RTF and Word formats, but alas without saving any style information, which makes it useless for later processing of long text into a PDF-workflow book publishing format through Adobe InDesign, so if you are writing a novel, a collection of recipes or a thesis, try something else.

Mariner Write: Mac only. Released in the early 1990s, Mariner Calc and Mariner Write are rather lightweight but full-featured spreadsheet and word processing applications for Apple Macintosh Computers.

StarOffice from Sun Microsystems is a proprietary office suite software package. It was originally developed by StarDivision and acquired by Sun in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000, creating a free, open source office suite called OpenOffice.org, mentioned above.

Good but expensive

WordPerfect is a proprietary word processing application owned by Corel. At the height of its popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the de facto standard word processor, but has since been eclipsed in sales by Microsoft Word.

Nota Bene is a suite of word processing and related software for Microsoft Windows derived from XyWrite, once the light, quick and agile text-only word processor of choice for journalists and magazine editors, now in its new incarnation adopted by the Modern Language Association of all people. It contains features aimed at an academic writing audience, including multilingual character sets, reference-managing tools, a bibliographic utility, and a textbase creation utility. It has full multilingual support. The learning curve is Himalayan and requires oxygen tanks. In 2009 it was in version 8.0.

Adobe’s Framemaker is the Jumbo Jet of word processors. In fact it was used to design literally tens of millions of pages of Boeing airplane parts lists, diagrams and manuals: just the kind of job it was built for. I struggled to learn it for a year, studying three different 500-page printed manuals, and gave up. It is as solid as a rock and can do anything, but choosing to use it to write an essay is like buying a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to do a spot of fishing. Bruce Byfield has a fascinating comparison between Framemaker and OpenOffice Writer here: http://www.linux.com/articles/39406. A heretical proposition, but Mr Byfield makes it sound very, very interesting:

Replace Adobe FrameMaker with OpenOffice.org Writer? Most people’s first reaction is amused disbelief. "FrameMaker is a hugely capable publishing product," my editor admonished me. "OOo is a marginally competent word processor." However, a functional comparison of several important desktop publishing features in both products shows that the products are more comparable than you might think.

FrameMaker has a reputation far out of keeping with its reality. While FrameMaker remains a stable and flexible product, its heyday is long past, and its features have not kept pace with modern expectations.

Moreover, its reputation is generally misplaced. Contrary to common assumptions, FrameMaker is not a desktop publishing program. Instead, it is a niche product for long documents, such as books, technical manuals, and dissertations. While brochures and posters can be done in FrameMaker (I’ve done both), it is not a designer’s first choice of tools for these jobs. Similarly, while OpenOffice.org’s Writer is often described as a Microsoft Word clone because of obvious borrowings in its interface, it would be more accurate to describe it as a cross between Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher. In other words, both FrameMaker and OpenOffice.org are publishing programs with limited capabilities compared to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. From this perspective, a comparison is not as unlikely as you might think. [More…]

Adobe InDesign is expensive and difficult to learn, though it is a wonderful tool for designing beautiful books and magazines, as noted above. It exports to XML, but to RTF only with difficulty. In other words, it locks you in. It is meant for typographic design, and is thus next to useless as a word processor, because in order to handle its elegant typography, brilliant hyphenation and sophisticated page layout, it has to produce huge files. A two-page business letter can bloat out to over two megabytes, a thousand times the size of a plain text email of the same document. And… did I mention that it is expensive?

Microsoft Word: Bloated, somewhat unstable, but usable.

Photos

Please check the size of your graphics files before you send them. My email server sometimes has trouble with files larger than about one megabyte.

Please do not send your photos gathered together into one file and compressed. This is a waste of time: all image files — GIF, JPG and PNG — are already compressed. If you need to send a number of photos, send them as separate attachments to one email. If you use a Macintosh and your email program automatically uses Stuffit compression to pack and compress outoing mail, please turn this feature OFF. Ninety per cent of computer users do not use a Macintosh, though perhaps they should.

The GIF format handles areas of flat colour well, but it doesn’t do gradation or shading in tone or color very well; JPG does that better, which is why it’s best for photos.

TIFF or TIF files are mainly used for printing ink on paper, or for storing images of fax pages. (Remember fax machines? Patented in 1843 by Scotsman Alexander Bain, used widely in the 1930s by newspapers, perfected in the 1970s by the Japanese and widely used everywhere, and consigned to oblivion in 2000 by the Internet.) TIFF files are usually large and unwieldy, though they can be very useful on the Internet, as almost every computer system can read them. They can also store metadata information in XML form within the file: photographer, subject, date, and so on, which gives them a great advantage for archival use.

You can send a photo by air mail. I can scan and return photos safely and promptly within a week or two. Jacket’s address is given near the top of this file.

Paragraphs in prose articles

If your submission is mainly prose, it will consist of a number of paragraphs. To allow readers to cite a particular place in your text, as they cannot refer to page numbers (fixed page sizes and thus page numbers as such do not exist in HTML documents) Jacket needs to provide paragraph numbers (or Section numbers: same thing.) See below.

And if your submission is a review, article or interview which contains some amount of quoted prose or poetry, please decide whether each quote is short or long, as short quotes do not need paragraph numbers, and long quotes do.

Short quotes are those which contain a dozen or so words of prose, or two or three lines of poetry, and they are best incorporated into the normal flow or your writing, marked clearly by being put within quote marks, like this phrase from a Wordswoth poem, for example:

The Romantic poet William Wordsworth sometimes wrote dull lines, it can’t be denied. For example, his description of a little girl’s coffin is meant to be touching; in an early version is was merely bathetic: “I measured it from side to side / ’Twas three feet long and two feet wide”. His friend Sam Coleridge remonstrated with him about the flaccid effect of these lines, but to little avail.

Notice the slant line with spaces on each side like this / to indicate a line break within the quoted matter. Stanza breaks are best indicated by // two slant lines.

Long quotes are different, and deserve their own paragraphs, formatted in the “blockquote” style. (We will take care of that “blockquote” formatting for you.) Please don’t surround these long quotes with quote marks, as the blockquote effect is quite sufficient to tell the alert reader that this is quoted matter.

Since these long quotes form paragraphs of their own, we need to give them special formatting and paragraph (or Section) numbers, as mentioned above. You can help here, by indicating paragraph breaks and where quoted matter starts and finishes in such a way that we can give each paragraph a number. (Please do not number the paragraphs yourself: we often need to add paragraph breaks to your text, and renumbering paragraphs is a pain.) Here’s how:

Between each paragraph of your main text, please give a single line with a period followed by the letters pp, that is, .pp
Please be careful not to type that back to front: pp. This is wrong! The period comes BEFORE the pp, not after it. And the pp is not bold or italic: just plain.

At the START of a piece of quoted matter — some lines from a poem, or a prose excerpt — please give a single line with a period followed by the letter p and the numeral one, that is, .p1
Again, please put the period FIRST.

Some of you may cling to the quaint habit of using the lower case letter l instead of the numeral 1, a hangover from the olden days when tiny, light portable typewriters lacked the full complement of keys. (I know this is hard to believe, but it’s true.) If so, please think again: the letter l will not work here. You will need to find the numeral 1 somewhere on your keyboard and use that. It’s usually near the top left-hand corner of the keyboard. Okay?

Please treat the END of a piece of quoted matter the same as if it were a normal paragraph break; please give a single line with a period followed by the letters pp, that is, .pp
Again, please put the period FIRST.

Here’s an example (the text is excerpted from John Redmond’s review of a Les Murray book in Jacket 1) of some marked up text:

When we typeset the piece and process it through our patented HTML convertor and coffee-maker, it ends up looking like this, with the quoted matter indented, in a sans serif typeface, and with helpful paragraph numbers in the far right margin:

Quoted matter

Just to clarify:

When you insert a quote consisting of a few lines or more from a poem or from a prose source, don’t indent it, and don’t put it in quotes or in italics. Insert a blank line (just one) at the top of the quoted matter containing a period and the letter p and the numeral one, and close it off with a new blank line (just one) containing a period and the letter p twice, like this:
.p1
I measured it from Side to Side —
’Twas three feet long, and two feet wide.
.pp
While you’re at it,
— Please resist the temptation to add a blank line above or below your quoted matter.
— Please check that the .p1 or .pp is not accidentally formatted as bold or italic.
— Please ensure that the .p1 or .pp is not preceeded by or followed by spacebars or tabs.
— Please do not use the lower case letter l for the numeral 1.

If you do it right, I can send a search-and-replace request through the piece and automatically replace .p1 and .pp with the appropriate typesetting code, including an indent, and a smaller sans-serif typeface.

Do not indent all the lines of a quote: my typesetting will do that. To indent a particular line from the left margin, use sufficient spacebars to indent the line the way it should look, using a proportional typeface like Times New Roman. The spacebar key is the long one at the bottom centre of your keyboard. Please do NOT use tabs, and do NOT use paragraph indentation codes. These disappear in XHMTL, leaving every line flush with the left margin. Mind you, that would improve most poems. In the following example, spacebar characters indent the fourth line of each sapphic stanza:
.p1
Writing Sapphics well is a tricky business.
Lines begin and end with a pair of trochees;
in between them dozes a dactyl, rhythm
rising and falling,

like a drunk asleep at a party. Ancient
Greek — the language seemed to be made for Sapphics,
not a worry; anyone used to English
finds it a bastard.
.pp

Tabs: no tabs or paragraph indents, please. Use SPACEBAR characters instead.

Please don’t use tabs for indented lines or paragraphs and please don’t use tabs to provide spaces between words. Why? Two reasons: your tabs may be one inch wide, ours are usually half a centimeter wide, and Mary Smith’s might be seven inches wide.

Also, and worse, when text is converted to HTML by our automatic translating machine, the tabs disappear and all your indented lines lose their indents, and your inter-word spacing disappears too. Reason: there is no such character as a ‘tab’ (tabulated alignment) in HTML.

The same problem applies to paragraph indents; that is, the automatically indented first-line-of-paragraph trick that Microsoft Word in (.doc or in .rtf files) provides for you. Paragraph indents disappear in HTML too.

Spacebars:
How do you see those pesky tabs? Display formatting codes, or “view non-printing characters”. You may need to use your word processor’s “Help” page to find out how to do this.

In most word processors, a tab character looks like a right-pointing arrow. If your text has tabs or paragraph indents, and if you really need them, please replace them with the appropriate number of spacebar characters. If you have a lot to replace, use search-and-replace. Spacebar characters are translated properly into HTML and your exquisitely-calculated indentations will be preserved for the astonishment and admiration of future generations.

Works cited/ Bibliography

Repeat after me: a word processor is not a typewriter. A word processor is not a typewriter. A word processor is not a typewriter.

1) When you compile a list of ‘works cited’ at the end of your essay or article, please don’t fake the traditional hanging indent by putting a paragraph break at the end of each over-run line and indenting each following line so that the entry looks like a hanging indent. A word processor is not a typewriter. The hanging indent should flow and re-form no matter how wide or narrow you make the margins. Why? A word processor is not a typewriter, that’s why. Here’s a screen shot that shows the difference, when you Show/Hide codes:

See how in the ‘fake’ hanging indent, paragraph returns show at the end of every line, but in the ‘true’ hanging indent, below, paragraph returns show only at the end of each entry, no matter how many lines it has?

So, please use your word processor’s ‘hanging indent’ style for that list of authors and titles. Remember, a word processor is not a typewriter. In Microsoft Word, here’s how:

Choose Menu > Format > Paragraph, then select

Alignment: Left;
Outline level: Body text;
Left: 0;
Right: 0;
Special: Hanging;
By: 1 cm [or .5 inches, if you are an old-fashioned person];
Spacing Before: 0;
Spacing After: 0;
Line spacing: 1.5.

2) When you have more than one book or article by the one author to cite, quote the author’s name for the first entry, then use three hyphens or three dashes for the citations that follow. For example:

Reviews: Length, and bibliographical information

Reviews in Jacket magazine are generally from 1,000 words to 10,000 words, depending on how interesting, different or important the book and/or the author is, and on how much the reviewer thinks should be said.

A general aim would be one to three thousand words per book; chapbooks or slight books would get less.

Serious reviewers with an important highly-researched topic and a lot to say can write to whatever length the subject needs; but do ask first. Jacket has published fifty-thousand word pieces, though not often.

If you are reviewing a book for Jacket, please help by setting out the title and bibliographical information at the top of your review like so:

_____________________________________

Laura Elrick: Fantasies in Permeable Structures, reviewed by Jill Magi

74 pp. Factory School/Heretical Texts. www.factoryschool.org. US $12. 1600010415 paper

Impermeable texts

_____________________________________

Susan Hampton: The Kindly Ones, reviewed by Nicole Mauro

94 pp. Five Islands Press. Paper. AUS $18.95 1 74128 093 1 cloth.

Kind Cuts

_____________________________________

in other words:

Author (or Editor): Title (title of the book under review): Subtitle (of the book, if it has one), reviewed by Reviewer (your name)

pages. extra pages. Publisher. Paper or hardback. Cost. ISBN paper/ cloth

A title for your review, if you can think of a good one

Please use plain simple type: don’t use bold, italic or ALL CAPITALS.

If the press is obscure, it might be useful to include contact details: a mailing address or an Internet address for the press or for a distributor.

It is also a good idea to include a number of excerpts from the book you are reviewing, to give the reader some idea of its flavour.

Before you write your review, please see [»] ‘How to indicate quoted matter’ above.

How to send in corrections

Please don’t submit a piece until you are certain that it is the final draft and will not need revising, ever, as long as you live. If you have any doubts, please don’t send it until you are certain that you can live with the appearance of the file as it is. Jacket cannot accept changes to your work except for typographical or factual corrections.

When you have such (minor) corrections to send, please don’t re-send the whole piece. Why?

Because I will have to typeset the whole piece all over again: run it through my Word macro to normalise errors like two spacebars after periods, wrong en and em dashes, etc, then add a blank paragraph number to each paragraph one by one, then process the file through Logictran’s HTML converter, then run the HTML file through BBEdit’s series of macros to convert line-breaks and blank paragraph numbers to proper XHTML, then edit the file in BBEdit to add page headers, page tails, page title, and each paragraph number one by one, then upload the final file via Transmit FTP to my Jacket site. Doing all that once with each file is quite enough.

So when there are minor unavoidable changes to be made, please send an email specifying the changes you want, one by one, referencing them by the surrounding text and/ or paragraph numbers.

For example:

1) Correction: paragraph 35: Arthur Rimbaud’s left leg was amputated in 1891.

Change < left > to < right >

2) Correction: paragraph 127:

I measured it from Side to Side —
’Twas eleven feet long, and two feet high.

Change < eleven > to < three >
Change < high > to < wide >

...and so forth.

Just send the corrections, identified by the surrounding text as in the example above, not by page numbers.

Page numbers: Please don’t refer to page numbers when you are talking about an HTML document on the Internet. ‘Pages’ in HTML aren’t really pages as such. When you print out a page, say ‘page thirty’ of an essay, on your printer, the entire file has different pagination to what it has when anyone else prints it out, depending on the fonts installed on your computer, the size of font your browser is set up to show, whether your browser can display tables or not, the kind of printer you are using and its default margin settings, and the size paper you use — US letter size is distinctly different from the international standard A4 size.

If you print that same ‘page thirty’ on someone else’s computer and printer, you may well get page twenty-eight, or page thirty-two.

PDF documents (Adobe Acrobat ‘Portable Document Format’ documents) on the Internet are different: they do have page numbers. But such documents are rare, as they don’t suit the medium at all well.

And in any case, when I’m editing a piece to incorporate corrections, I can’t see any page numbers, just a long unpaginated series of lines of text.

Typefaces

You wouldn’t think it matters, but it does. Please use a normal proportional-spaced font like Times New Roman for your work. Please don’t use a typewriter monospaced font like Courier. If you do, and you are fussy about line indents, you might send me something that looks like this on your screen, with ‘blithe’ beginning a stepped-down line, starting at a point just after the end of the previous line, using Courier, a monospaced typewriter-style font:

But when it is typeset for Jacket, which uses a proportional font such as Georgia or Times New Roman, it will come out looking like this:

See how the ‘blithe’ has slid back under the word ‘thee’? In both examples above, there were twelve spacebar characters before ‘blithe’, but spacebars in monospaced fonts are the same width as any other letter — the ‘m’ for example — and this is more than twice the width of spacebar characters in any proportionally-spaced font.

Mind you, I just hate fussy indents; they just don’t work well in HTML. See below.

Page breaks: no page breaks, please.

If you wish to send material that has manual page breaks within it, please think again, and get rid of the manual page breaks. (A manual page break is where you tell your computer to force a new page to begin.) There are no ‘page breaks’ on the Internet. Pages on the Internet are not pages as we know them, Jim. They aren’t paper, for a start. They are more like long vertical scrolls that scroll up and down behind the imaginary window that is your computer screen. Look at this page, for example: it is one single computer file, with a head and a tail, about three metres tall, if you printed it out on a continuous sheet of paper.

Go on: scroll up and down as far as you can. It’s long, isn’t it? And where are the page breaks? There aren’t any.

When you DO print this file, because you (probably) use a standard laser computer printer, it appears are a series of sheets of paper. On a printer fitted with a continuous roll of paper, like computers used to have in the old days, it would appear as a long single scroll.

If you wish to indicate significant breaks in the flow of your text, replace the manual page breaks with a symbol of some kind, like so: insert a blank line, then a group of three asterisks, then a blank line, with the asterisks indented using spacebar characters. (Please don’t indent anything using a tab or a paragraph indent code: they just disappear in HTML.) You can use the oddly-named pilcrow (or paragraph mark) like this:

You can insert this in Microsoft Word by choosing Insert / Symbol and looking for it in the list of proffered characters.

A: With issue 32 (April 2007) we have begun to provide paragraph numbers in some long articles so that scholars and reviewers can refer to a specific section of a document when they wish to give an accurate citation. They can’t refer to a page number, which is what they usually do with books. They are not links, and they don’t “do” anything. The ones on this page are just samples.

Interviews: please don’t use italics

If you’re sending an interview, please don’t make the questions or answers italic. A little italic goes a long way on a computer screen, and because the uprights of the characters are angled, they become jagged and hard to read. Just start the questions with Q: and the answers with A:, or use the interlocutors’ surnames or initials. There are four interviews in Jacket 24, all typeset differently (I’m still experimenting.) Take a look at them, but please don’t try to imitate the indents or color, just use plain type. I’ll do the fancy typesetting.

Here are some of Jacket’s editorial conventions. These conventions may be arbitrary, but they are not that arbitrary — I have spent thirty years thinking about them. I do everything involved in Jacket, including typesetting, and I do it for nothing. My time is precious to me. So please convert your idiosyncrasies to mine before you send your pieces.

Punctation: periods (full stops), decades

Sentences have one spacebar character following the period, not two. Please. You type a single spacebar character after a comma, after a colon, and after a semi-colon, don’t you? Well, periods, exclamation points and question marks are just the same. Here’s Wikipedia, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing:

More recent works on typography weigh in strongly. Ilene Strizver, founder of the Type Studio, says, “Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong.” The Complete Manual on Typography (2003) states that “The typewriter tradition of separating sentences with two word spaces after a period has no place in typesetting” and the single space is “standard typographic practice”. The Elements of Typographic Style (2004) advocates a single space between sentences, noting that “your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint [double spacing] Victorian habit.” David Jury’s book, About Face: Reviving the Rules of Typography (2004) clarifies the contemporary typographic position on sentence spacing:

Word spaces, preceding or following punctuation, should be optically adjusted to appear to be of the same value as a standard word space. If a standard word space is inserted after a full point or a comma, then, optically, this produces a space of up to 50% wider than that of other word spaces within a line of type. This is because these punctuation marks carry space above them, which, when added to the adjacent standard word spaces, combines to create a visually larger space. Some argue that the ‘additional’ space after a comma and full point serves as a “pause signal” for the reader. But this is unnecessary (and visually disruptive) since the pause signal is provided by the punctuation mark itself.

Decades like the nineteen-sixties: Please don’t insert an apostrophe and call the 1960s the 1960’s: I just have to take it out again. (When you spell out the word, you don’t spell it like this: the nineteen-sixty’s, do you?... uh... you do?!?)

Quotes: single or double quotes acceptable; how to make curly quotes

Use double quotes, and single quotes within them if needed; or if you prefer, you can use single quotes, and double quotes within them if needed. Jacket’s house style is single quotes first, then when needed double quotes inside single quotes, but who can argue against two hundred million Americans? Not I. They still insist on using quaint paper sizes such as ‘legal’ (21.59 cm by 35.56 cm, or 8.5 by 14 inches) and ‘letter size’ (21.59 by 27.94 cm or 8.5 by 11 inches) and ‘executive size’ (18.41 cm by 26.67 cm or 7.25 by 10.5 inches), when the rest of the civilised world uses the International standard A, B and C sizes. America is a strange country: just as trainee executives aren’t allowed to use the Executive Washroom, so junior typists aren’t allowed to type on ‘Executive Size’ paper: they have to use the ‘junior’ size sheet.

Single quotes has been the government-recommended practice in Australia and may other countries for forty years. The Dutch environmental scholar Dr Winkelschnippe of Leyden has calculated that if North American book publishers used single instead of double quotes, this would save hundreds of millions of litres of polluting printing ink every decade — several times the capacity of the Hoover Dam.

XHTML allows for true typeset ‘single quotes’ and “double quotes”, usually known as ‘curly quotes.’ If you use Microsoft Word, you can change from curly quotes to straight quotes and back again. A right-hand single curly quote is the same character as an apostrophe. Here’s what the Help file says:

You can find and replace all instances of single or double curly quotes with straight quotes in your document. To do this, clear the Straight quotes with smart quotes check box on the AutoFormat As You Type tab. On the Edit menu, click Replace. In both the Find what and Replace with boxes, type " or ’, and then click Find Next or Replace All.

To replace all straight quotes with curly quotes, select the Straight quotes with smart quotes check box, and repeat the find and replace procedure.

Dashes

We use an em dash — like this — here at Jacket’s downtown office; but that’s typesetting. When you’re typing up a poem or essay to send in, we (and most other editors) like you to use a spacebar, two hyphens, and a spacebar -- like this. We can convert that into typeset dashes without too much trouble, as long as you’re consistent.

If you want your typed material to look more professional, you can try a few typesetting tricks.

Microsoft Word allows you to insert em dashes using the ‘Insert Symbol’ command: Alt + i. Better still, Word allows you to map this symbol (and any other symbol) to a combination of keys, such as Control plus Shift plus (right square bracket). See ‘customizing shortcut keys’ in the Help file.

Most other word processors will allow the same symbol to be used: look in your word processor’s Help file.

You can use a hyphen between dates such as 1943-45, or for page ranges like pages 233-56, but if you want to be fancy, you can use dashes. It’s traditional to use an en dash, which is half the width of an em dash (well, the letter n is about half the width of the letter m, isn’t it?): ‘the period 1922–43’, ‘pages 173–229’. In this case there is no space either side of the dash.

Bibliographies: Three hyphens work fine, but you can use the em dash (tripled as a 3-em dash) in bibliographies to replace the author’s name when a series of works by the same author is listed. For example:

McGann, Jerome J. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

———. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Penberthy, Jenny. Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

———. A Posse of Two: Lorine Niedecker and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Chapman 78–79 (1994): 17–22.

Titles

1)

Titles of books, anthologies, magazines or newspapers are in italics, with no quotes, and please NOT in CAPITAL LETTERS — IT LOOKS AS THOUGH YOU’RE SHOUTING! When I get articles with a list of book titles set in capital letters, I have to re-type each title, one letter at a time. Please do not use _underscores_: use true italics instead. If your word processor can’t manage italics, buy one that can, or download the free OpenOffice Writer from http://www.openoffice.org/.

2)

Titles of poems, short stories or magazine articles (when they are quoted in an article) are in plain roman type (not italics) and have single quotes. Here is an example:

John Ashbery’s poem ‘Two Scenes’ begins his first collection of poems, Some Trees, which was published in 1956.

3)

The titles of your own poems or articles which you send to Jacket should be in plain roman type, capitals and lower case, and have no quotes.

Please try to grasp the fact that there is a simple hierarchical structure to this: if a piece is a small component of a larger whole — a poem in a book of poems, an essay in a magazine full of essays, a chapter in a book with lots of chapters — then it has quotes around it. To italicise a whole title is a serious typographical gesture, so it is reserved for larger, more important works: novels (collections of many chapters), anthologies of poems, assemblages of essays.

I used to abjure the use of italics, because the resolution of most computer screens is rather coarse — either 72 dots per inch (Macintosh) or 96 dots per inch (IBM) — and a line at an angle produces a jagged, stepped appearance. Horizontal or vertical lines don’t suffer from this effect. Italic type is angled type by its nature, and on a small, low resolution screen it can be difficult to read. I have even had some Jacket readers complain that they simply could not read words in italic type on their screens. But by late 2000 computer monitors had improved in size and resolution to the point where I’ve given up worrying about it. One less worry!

For a while there, an enthusiasm of mine was to use double angled brackets or «guillemets» to indicate book titles; that’s how it’s often done in Europe. Robert Bringhurst in his informative book «The Elements of Typographic Style» says that ‘French and Italian typographers set their guillemets with the points out, «thus», while German-speaking typographers usually set them »the opposite way«.’ Ain’t people strange? Furthermore:

‘guillemet’ versus ‘guillemot’:

The word ‘guillemet’ is derived from the French spelling of the name William; French for ‘Little Willy’, Bringhurst says, named after the sixteenth-century typecutter Guillaume [William] le Bé, who may have invented the device.

Guillemot: note the plumage!

Also derived from the French for ‘William’ is the similar word ‘guillemot’, a North Atlantic sea-bird, Uria aalge (see photo). A common Australian bird is the Willy Wagtail, no relative.

In Adobe Systems font software, its file format specifications, and in all fonts derived from these that contain the characters, “guillemet” is incorrectly spelled “guillemot” (a malapropism: guillemot is actually a species of seabird) in the names of the two glyphs: guillemotleft and guillemotright. Adobe acknowledges the error. Likewise, in Unix systems, X11 mistakenly calls them “XK_guillemotleft” and “XK_guillemotright” in the file keysymdef.h. (Wikipedia)

How to remember the different spellings?
— To typeset the symbol guillemet, metal type was traditionally used.
— The guillemot has mottled plumage.

Line spacing

Why paragraphs should be much shorter on the Internet

For an article meant to be read on the Internet, paragraphs need to be much shorter than they would for printed output. If you provide me with long paragraphs, I will have to insert extra paragraph breaks. This has nothing to do with literary style, and everything to do with eyestrain and misery.

Everyone agrees that it is difficult and tiring to read large amounts of text on the Internet. There are several reasons why, and they are cumulative.

When you’re reading a book, you adjust the angle of the page, the intensity of the light source and your distance from the light source without thinking. You hold the book so that you look down at it, at a comfortable angle. The light is reflected from the white or off-white paper. The ink is perfectly black, the resolution of the edges of the text on the paper is as sharp as a razor: at least an apparent one thousand dots per inch. So the page is comfortably white; the text is perfectly black and crisp.

Reading from a computer screen is different. The page is vertical or almost vertical, and at a fixed distance from your eyes. You have to sit up straight and hold your head back at a higher angle, and this strains the muscles at the back of your neck. The light source comes from inside the page, and it is not easy to adjust its intensity. The effect is glare, and you’re looking right into it.

The text is made up of blended glowing phosphor dots coloured with different proportions of red, green and blue, and the resolution is generally no more than 72 dots per inch (Macintosh) or 96 dots per inch (IBM style Personal Computer), compared to the 1,000 dots per inch of print. No text on a computer screen is ever black: the darkest it can get is the colour of your screen when it is turned off, and that is usually dark grey. So you have blurry dark grey text with coarse edges on a glaring white surface. Already we have pain.

When you turn a page, you know exactly what to expect: a new page, just like the old, continuing exactly where the old one left off. When you click the scroll bar on a computer screen, what you have been reading disappears in a flash, and is instantly replaced by something different, but you have no exact idea where the new text begins. You scan the screen: is the new text right at the top of the screen, or a little bit below the top, or maybe a third of the way down the screen? You find it, but only after a moment of strain and adjustment each time. You go through this process every two hundred or so words. You could try scrolling line by line, but then the whole page jerks up again and again. More strain.

I could go on, but the main point is simple: reading from a screen is a pain, and writers and editors should do everything they can to make the pain less. This involves using shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs, providing ample left and right margins and off-white plain backgrounds (never patterned backgrounds, please!), dark type, clear page navigation systems, easy-to-grasp contents pages, and so forth.

Oh — please use two carriage returns between paragraphs. And there’s no need to indent the beginning of paragraphs. If I want to do that to your text, I can easily do it later.

Layout 101: Why can’t things stay the way I typed them?

Q: Why does the lineation and layout of my article or poem change when I view it on a different computer?

A: Good question. I’ll try to answer it. When your browser shows you a page on the Internet, what it is doing is interpreting a set of typesetting instructions and some text and images, and presenting the results, as best it can, on your screen. Typically, the code on Jacket pages asks your browser to show the page in the form of divisions, 600 or 800 pixels wide, with an off-white background colour.

— Why 600 or 800 pixels wide?
— It’s a comfortable size to read: line lengths are not so long that you have to hunt for the beginning of a new line when your eye leaves the tail end of the one before.

— Why an off-white background colour?
— Plain white produces glare that is tiring to read; plain mid-grey (the standard background colour in the early days of the World Wide Web) looks muddy to me, and offers too little contrast for the black type to stand out clearly. Jacket mostly uses an off-white whose hex code is ‘ffffef’.

Some computers and some browsers may not be capable of showing our divisions, which use Cascading Style Sheets for their formatting. The colors may differ, too: Macintosh computers have a different way of showing colors compared to the IBM PC I use, because they have a different kind of color contrast (gamma) built in; a mid-green on my computer will show up on a Mac as deep green, almost black, and a pleasing mid yellow or blue on my machine will often show up as a very pale pastel on a Mac. Designers who use a lot of colour on their pages should always double-check their work on both systems. I have seen pages whose message is camouflaged in a forest of tiny rust-brown type on a glowing brownish-red background. Ugh!

Most text in Jacket is typeset in a font called Georgia. But that font is not sent to you over the Internet: most fonts are copyrighted, and that would be illegal. If you have bought that font and have installed it on your computer, Georgia is what you’ll see. All recent builds of the Windows operating system come with Georgia as a free standard font.

If you don’t have Georgia installed, you’ll see the text in some other font, probably Times New Roman, a font designed by Stanley Morison for The Times newspaper in London in the early 1930s, which most computers have installed by default. All fonts have slightly different letter widths and thicknesses, so in a passage of prose, or in a poem with very long lines, the line breaks will fall differently depending on which font is installed on your machine.

Then again, your browser may be set up to override these specifications, in which case the font type, the font size, and the font colour may well be entirely different. Poorly sighted people can specify that their browser show all fonts in black colour in the largest size possible. This helps them read even small footnotes, but imagine what it does to the line breaks!

So — when I look at this page on my computer, I see what I expect to see. Every other computer will show it slightly differently, depending on the type of computer being used, the type of browser being used to view the page, the type of monitor being used and the screen size in pixels which the monitor is set to show (these vary between 640 by 480 pixels, 800 by 600, 1024 by 768, 1280 by 1024, and 1600 by 1200), and especially important is the way the browser is set up to show fonts. And over-riding all other factors, this all depends on the actual fonts you happen to have installed on your computer.

As Jacket’s designer, I feel like a one-legged Thai kick-boxer fighting an agile octopus in a dark room: I send out my nicely-designed pages onto the Internet, but I have no way of knowing or of duplicating any of these interacting factors, so I don’t really know how those pages will look on your screen.

These technological issues have interesting implications for modern poetry. Most poets imagine that a page on their computer screen is more or less like a printed page in a book. Partly true, but not completely true! Read on...

Layout 102: A heartfelt plea to poets fond of fussy indents:

Please don’t.

Poems with indented lines don’t work well on the Internet; the longer the indent and the more fussy the spacing, the less likely it is to come out looking the way you want it to. For some reason, the people who invented HTML code and the browsers needed to read it designed it to collapse any amount of white space (that is, spacebar characters) into one single white space; so two, five, ten or fifty-seven spacebars will appear on the screen as one single spacebar character. There are ways to work around this problem, but these workarounds are tedious and time-consuming and they don’t work reliably on all browsers.

I have heard poets read out aloud poems with fussy indents, and guess what? You can’t hear the indents at all. No extra pauses are given where the fussy indents appear; the poet reads the text out loud as though it had a normal left margin. So why not print it that way?

Please ask yourself honestly what these fussy indents are supposed to mean. What do they actually add to the poem? What is their rhythmic function? They certainly attract attention to the special ‘poetic’ nature of the text, to a slight extent, but do you need to do that? Shakespeare didn’t need them for his sonnets — do you?

But... (I hear you cry...)

Yes, Shakespeare (or Shakespeare’s printer) did use indents in his plays, and for a sensible reason. I call these ‘stepped indents’; they occur when a pentameter line is broken across two or more actors’ parts, and the stepped indent preserves the length and shape of the total rhythmical unit. Here’s an example, from Hamlet:

Francisco: Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

Bernardo: Long live the king!

Francisco: Bernardo?

Bernardo: He.

Francisco: You come most carefully upon your hour.

Layout 103: Long lines — do you really need them?

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the typesetting code that underlies the Internet’s Web pages. The browsers that translate HTML into type and images on your screen were developed by bright but aesthetically-challenged students and research scientists with no training in graphic design or typography. The system has great advantages, and has revolutionised publishing; but it does make it impossible to typeset the correct turnover point and new-line indentation for turned-over lines of verse. This means that when Jacket presents a very long line of verse, its readers may well think they are reading two lines of verse; one long, and one fairly short. Each different reader may well see the turnover point, which they think is the start of a new line, at a different point in the original long line.

Please note: it’s not difficult to show when a long line of verse has been turned over. It’s impossible.

It’s impossible, because I have no control over how Jacket’s readers have set up their computers to show long lines of text. The only way to force a particular typeface, type size, line length and page width on my readers is to typeset and present each page of the magazine as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. PDF files are designed for printability, where they are very useful, but they are clumsy on the Internet and are universally disliked. Usability expert Jacob Neilsen says such files are ‘unfit for human consumption’, and has strong and sensible things to say about them here:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html
and here:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030728.html

In this example from a poem by British poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson, typeset by Jacket as a piece of quoted material in a review (that is, indented and in a smaller typeface than the body of the review) the following single line of verse will usually display with the break before the word ‘transition’ in Internet Explorer 5.5:

from an intersection between ‘the most perfect château of the
transition period’

and with the break before the word ‘of’ in a different browser, Netscape Navigator 4.07:

from an intersection between ‘the most perfect château
of the transition period’

Browsers whose interpretation of Cascading Style Sheets is uncouth may display the entire line unbroken. And of course these examples may not display correctly on all browsers!

Where it is important for reasons of scholarly accuracy to determine the author’s original intended line-endings for every line, the source-code can be displayed by most browsers with these commands from your menu:
      View/ Source, or
      View/ Page Source.
The code for a forced line break is either
      <br> in HTML, or
      <br /> in XHTML.
(XHTML is a later, improved version of HTML.)

Here is what the line will look line when viewed as source code (the numerical codes present opening and closing single quotes and the circumflex accent):

from an intersection between ‘the most perfect château of the transition period’<br />

As long as the page has been typeset correctly (!), this code always gives the author’s intentions unambiguously, regardless of the visual image of the page displayed by the browser — something a printed page often fails to do. To be fair, one Brownie point to HTML.

So, what can be done to reproduce poems with very long lines in HTML?

Practically nothing.

One solution is to mark the end of each long line with an extra plus sign. Jacket tried this for a while, but it is distracting, and then what do you do about fairly long lines, or slightly long lines... use a plus sign for them too?

An alternative is to make each line a paragraph, and set the paragraph style as a hanging indent, so that each extra-long line (that is, each turned-over line) shows clearly as indented, and thus cannot be mistaken for a new line.

Jacket uses this style for endnotes and bibliographies because it shows the start of each entry clearly, but it’s not right for poetry, mainly because the people who invented HTML thought that paragraphs should have a blank line under each one. The only books they ever knew were science text-books, apparently, and it seems they hadn’t encountered the Bobbsey Twins or the Famous Five, let alone the novels of Dickens, or Marcel Proust.

You can see how this looks here, and why the extra line-spacing would be distracting in a poem, especially one with short lines as well as extra-long lines:

McGann, Jerome J., Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

———, The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Penberthy, Jenny, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

———, A Posse of Two: Lorine Niedecker and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Chapman 78–79 (1994): 17–22.

There is a way to use hanging indents with no extra line-spacing, but I don’t feel confident that I can use the technique consistently at this stage.

A contrary thought or two on paragraph indentation (in print on paper) from the great designer Jan Tschichold (1901–1974; photo, left) in 1950:

Why the Beginnings of Paragraphs Must be Indented

WHEN WRITING down a sequence of thoughts, the author arranges them in the form of sentences which are grouped together. These groups of sentences are followed by a pause, a break. Today’s unattractive section symbol § is no more than a poor variant of the medieval symbol ¶ which originally could also appear in the middle of running lines and was colored. It signified the beginning of a new group of sentences. During the late Middle Ages such groups of sentences were introduced with a new line, but the habit remained of beginning the new group with the symbol for paragraph, usually written in red. Some of the early printers even cut it as a type sort and printed it in black. Previously, though, it was inserted by hand in red by the rubricator (whose job description stems from the color: rubrum - red). The space for the symbol had to be left blank by the typesetter. But rubrication often did not take place, and it was found that the em quad indention or indent, as we call this empty space today, was sufficient by itself to define a new group of sentences, even without the red symbol.
This is still the case today. So far, no device more economical or even equally good has been found to designate a new group of sentences. There has been no shortage of attempts, though, to replace an old habit with a new one. But to destroy something old and replace it with something new, hoping that it will take hold, only makes sense if, first, there is a need to do this, and, second, the new device is better than the old one. [....]

__________
From The Form of the Book — Essays on the morality of good design, ISBN 0-88179-116-4, Published by Hartley & Marks Publishers Inc., P.O. Box 147, Point Roberts, Washington 98281, USA / 3661 West Broadway Vancouver, B.C. v6R 2B8
Originally published in German as Ausgewählte Aufsätze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie by Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, © 1975. Translation Copyright ©1991 by Hartley & Marks, Inc. If not available at your local bookstore, this book may be ordered directly from the publisher. Send the cover price plus one dollar fifty for shipping costs to the above address.

(‘Tschichold’ is pronounced ‘Chick-old’)

A digression... Chain Letters

Please don’t ever send chain letters to me, to Jacket, nor to anyone, ever. Here’s why: All chain letters on the Internet are created with malicious intent. It’s not just that they’re fake, and that no money ever gets sent to the poor little girl with terminal cancer (to use a recent example). The real problem is that chain letters, by their very nature, choke the Internet to a halt.

Take a minute to think about just how much damage a chain letter will create in two weeks. Say the chain letter simply asks you to send a copy of the letter to five of your friends (who are asked to do the same, and so on). I received one in mid-1999, from a friend who had sent copies to twenty-two of her friends, so five copies is a reasonable minimum. Five copies of a nice letter, sent to a few friends... sounds harmless, right?

Wrong. Here’s why:

So, in just two weeks, over six billion copies of a chain letter have choked the Internet to a halt, not to mention the mailboxes of every corporation, university and public service organisation in the English-speaking world.

If you do receive a chain letter and you wish to check it out, a good source of up-to-date information is the Computer Virus Myths page by Rob Rosenberger http://www.vmyths.com/

Another useful site: the HoaxKill website at http://www.hoaxkill.com/ will backtrack for you up the chain of letters you’ve received and tell all the people who sent you the message that they’ve been party to a malicious hoax.

Here are two other spam fighting sites:
http://spam.abuse.net/ and http://www.spamhaus.org/

Jacket’s [»»] copyright policy. The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/00/styleguide.shtml

Jacket magazine: Editorial style guide

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