BCRA > Publications > Speleology > Guidelines

Guidelines for Submissions

Writing for Speleology (10 top tips) | top

We are always pleased to receive articles. We don't want to be too prescriptive, but here are some basic points that help to make things easier for us.

1. Do not embed photos, graphics or tables in your text. We prefer to receive the text on its own with everything else in separate files.
2. Name all your files sensibly - possibly with your name or a photo caption. Please do not submit supporting files with just a reference number out of your camera.
3. Refer to your photos in the text (e.g. "insert Smith-photo-3.jpg here").
4. Provide a document containing a list of photos, graphics, surveys and their captions and credits. (We need to know who took the photo or drew the survey).
5. If you are not used to submitting articles to magazines, please understand that we will inevitably need to edit your text. Even the most perfect text will need cutting if it is too long to fit. Therefore: once you have submitted your text please do not submit a new version without checking first. If we have already started work on your text we will need a list of corrections and not a fresh version of the entire text.
6. If you do re-submit anything, please never, ever, re-use a previous filename.
7. We prefer articles that contain photos, diagrams or cave surveys. However, there are some technical points you need to be aware of. Photos need to be of a good size and quality. We need at least 350 pixels per inch, so logos (etc) lifted off web sites will usually be far too small. Please do not do too much tweaking in Photoshop and do not over-compress JPG images. Images straight out of your camera are preferred.
8. Cellphone cameras have lots of pixels but poor-quality lenses, which are seemingly often smeared with grease, sweat and dust. The photo may look great on your phone, but can still be too poor a quality for us to use. Please use a decent camera or, at least, clean your lens!
9. Graphics and cave surveys have to be at a much higher resolution than photos. We aim for 1200 pixels/inch. This may be far higher then you are used to dealing with, so please ask us for advice. Again, data lifted from web sites will be too low a resolution for us. Vector data is great. Bit map formats should use non-aliased lines and all text should be in black, not coloured or shaded. We may ask you to alter the line thickness.
10. If you have charts or graphs drawn in Excel we would prefer these to be supplied as Excel files, which we can manipulate; rather than as graphical bit-mapped exports.

Further Details

Words per Page | top

Feature Articles

• A 'typical' feature article might be two (or possibly three) pages long.
• For the first page of a feature article, with a title and 'standfirst' text - about 1400 words
• For subsequent pages of a feature article, with three-column text, no photos or diagrams - about 1600 words
• For a typical 2-page article with two large-ish photos or diagrams - about 2200 words in total

News items, 'In brief' etc

• A quarter page of text, or a single column of three-column text is roughly 400-500 words

Tips for Writers | top

• Separate your text into manageable paragraphs. Use a system of sub-headings. Read it through. Give it to a friend to read.
• Check all proper names - especially foreign ones. Be consistent. If you do not spell the name of a foreign cave, mountain, person, town consistently, how will we know which is the correct spelling?
• Add all foreign accents to your text. Your word processors's 'help' function will tell you how to do this!
• Distances should be in metric units.

There are many other rules for writing, but we wont bore you with them. We have a team of volunteer sub-editors who will look closely at your text and will make sure it meets our requirements.

Format for files | top

The preferred format for text is either a plain text file (*.txt) or, if you need to include non-ascii characters (e.g. Greek symbols, accents, super/sub-scripts) then Microsoft Word or Open Office. Note: it is not necessary for you to apply any formatting to your MS Word document since all formatting and embellishments will be stripped out when the text is imported into our editing package.

Information for Book Reviews | top

For book reviews we normally like to receive a scan of the front cover, and as much of the following information as you can provide. Please list this information, one item per line, at the start of the review.

• Title of Book or Journal
• Author
• City of Publication (for books, not required for periodicals)
• Publisher (for books, not required for periodicals)
• Year of Publication
• Price (& currency, state hardback or paperback version)
• ISBN or ISSN
• Number of Pages (follow usual convention for listing index & appendices; state if text is in a foreign language, e.g. "xiv + 34pp + index, in Polish with English summaries.")
• Illustrations (give number and type; go into as much detail as you think appropriate or can be bothered with! (e.g. "15 area maps (mostly colour), 19 surveys, 24 colour photos, tables of deepest/longest caves.")
• Reviewer (State the name of the reviewer)
• Availability (if item is not available in shops, where can it be obtained? Please state if your review copy has been deposited in the British Caving Library, and if it is available in caving shops)

Equations, Tables and Other Additions to the Text | top

Equations: These should be kept to a minimum, but if you need to include any mathematical or chemical equations please insert these in the text using an equation editor (Both Microsoft Word and Open Office provide this as part of the package). Or, at a pinch, write them on a separate piece of paper. It is not necessary for you to consider the font sizes used in your equation editor, as we will over-ride these with our house style.

Tables: Do not include these in the text, although you should include a caption for the table, and a reference (e.g. "insert here: Table 1 (list of caves discovered)". Please supply tables in a separate file; either as plain tab-separated text (use only a single tab!) or in a formatted table in Microsoft Word, Excel or the OpenOffice equivalents. Dont worry about the detailed formatting because we will strip it out and re-draw your table from scratch, anyway. The main thing is to have the data in an unambiguous layout that we cannot misinterpret when we copy it.

Photographs | top

Photos of caves, people, equipment; scans of the covers of journals and books for review - all of this helps to make the magazine more interesting and helps to break up the text into manageable chunks. Inside the magazine there will probably only be monochrome photos, but the front and rear covers will contain colour.

As a rough guide, we need at least 350 pixels per inch, so logos (etc) lifted off web sites will usually be far too small. Please do not do too much tweaking in Photoshop and do not over-compress JPG images. Images straight out of your camera are preferred. In practice, we could probably manage with les than 350 ppi if we had to - but we do need some leeway for cropping and to cope with the artifacts introduced by JPEG compression. If your camera produces only a JPEG output then you should use the minimum compression (i.e. highest quality) possible. Cellphone cameras have lots of pixels but poor-quality lenses, which are seemingly often smeared with grease, sweat and dust. The photo may look great on your phone, but can still be too poor a quality for us to use. Please use a decent camera or, at least, clean your lens!

Line Drawings, Diagrams, Cave Surveys | top

Graphics and cave surveys have to be at a much higher resolution than photos. We aim for 1200 pixels/inch. This may be far higher then you are used to dealing with, so please ask us for advice. Again, data lifted from web sites will be too low a resolution for us. Vector data (such as SVG formal) is great. Bit map formats (like TIF, PNG) should use non-aliased lines and all text should be in black, not coloured or shaded. We may ask you to alter the line thickness. Some details appear below...

We are in the process of writing some software to automate the conversion of your line widths and colour shadings to our requirements, so if the specification below seems too 'onerous' a task, please send us an example SVG file and we'll discuss it with you.

We prefer a vector format to a bit-map format

Why? A vector format scan be scaled to any size, and always reproduces at the maximum resolution of the system - which in our case is 2400dpi. Bit-map formats will look fuzzy by comparison, bordering on illegible in some cases. Remember, even if it looks good on your computer screen that does not mean it will look good as a high-quality printout.

Our preferred vector format is SVG. We can also accept WMF at a pinch and - if you are submitting charts, graphs, etc - these can be in Excel format (but not a graphical export from Excel - we need the actual 'chart').

For bit-map formats, we prefer TIF. PNG is not always suitable, although we could try it; and JPG is not suitable unless the compression is set to a very low level and there is no small text.

Line and Text Colours

All lines and text should be a single ink colour at 100% saturation, i.e. full black or less usefully, full cyan, full magenta or full yellow.

Why? i) Anything that is a combination of colours might suffer from registration problems when it is printed. ii) anything that is not 100% saturated cannot be drawn as a high-resolution line, and has to go in, essentially, at 150 dpi (see below).

Fill colours and shading

Fills do not have the above restriction, but you should try to use only pale shades and bear in mind that there might be some colour shift.

Why? The CMYK colour gamut is less than that for RGB and it cannot reproduce highly saturated colours that are a mix of inks, so pure red, green and blue are not possible, neither is deep pink etc. In most cases, if you are happy to accept a colour shift, you need not consider this problem further.

Use of "transparency"

Sometimes, people obtain a light shading by using "transparency". Please do not do this unless it is essential - we prefer colours to be solid (i.e. 100% opaque).

Why? If you make your drawing less than 100% opaque, it can cause problems when it is one of several layers of data on our pages. If you need to use transparency in order to show cave passages underneath your top layer of drawing, we can probably accommodate this but at the expense of additional work - which takes time and causes delays.

Line width and text height

It obviously helps if these are chosen with respect to the final size of the survey, so it might be easier for you to supply a draft and then, later in the editing process, for us to either alter the line widths ourselves, or request an updated file. The minimum line width is probably about 0.5pt or about 0.2mm (8px at 1200ppi) at the final reproduced size. Do not use the 'hairline' setting in your graphics package, as this often defaults to one pixel (which is far too narrow for us). The minimum size for text is 6pt, which is 2mm high (or 100px at 1200ppi) at the final reproduced size. Try to avoid using text that is more than 10pt in size at the final reproduced size.

What's the problem? If you draw your survey with 5mm text intending it to print on an A0 sheet of paper (1189mm wide) then, at 200mm wide, in our magazine, the text would be only 0.5mm high, and unreadable. We need you to use text and lines suitable for reading at the final reproduced size.

Text positioning

For surveys - if possible, text should not overlap the drawing. This is probably not possible to achieve for the majority of the text on a cave survey, but it would help if the larger text objects were clear. For charts and graphs - please do not overlap any lines with any labelling.

Why? It gives us more control over layout if we can apply the text separately. If the graphic has been drawn such that it requires the text to overlap, or if you have provided a bit-map where we cannot delete the text objects, then we may not be able to do the necessary manipulation.

Text colour coding

For colour surveys, and possibly also charts, you might have the habit of keying the text colour to a particular part of the drawing. Please avoid doing this, wherever possible, and instead provide some other method of referencing text to a colour-shaded part of the drawing.

Why? i) We might reproduce your graphic in monochrome. ii) In a colour print, the text still needs to be in black (or pure C,M,Y) or it will not print clearly.

Do not use Microsoft Draw!

Please do not draw diagrams using Microsoft Draw (i.e. embedded in a Word document) without asking us first.

Why? Such objects cannot be correctly copied from one computer to another - even between copies of Word - because they depend on the user's personal configuration of Word. If you need to use Draw, please ask for some detailed guidelines.

Advice on how to draw a cave survey

Cave survey drawing has reached an advanced standard and there are many people on the public forums that can offer you advice. Try ukcaving.com or cavesurveying.org.uk

Why all the fuss over resolution?

When text is printed in black ink, our system uses a resolution of 2400 dpi. At this resolution the text appears nice and crisp. (The same would apply to text printed in pure cyan, magneta or yellow, but there is no need to discuss that complication). However, each dot of ink can only be black or white so, to print in shades of grey requires a process called half-toning; that is, the shade is made up of different-sized blobs of ink. These blobs are called rosettes and, in our system, there are 150 rosettes per inch. Thus each rosette is made up of a 16 x 16 matrix of ink dots (because the native output is at 2400 dpi) and the matrix can represent a small blob or a large blob as required. The result of this is that any line that is not 100% black will be 'lumpy' at 150 varying-sized blobs per inch, instead of smooth at 2400 dpi. In practice, although text is output at 2400 dpi, line graphics will look sufficiently smooth at anything down to around 800 dpi. Below that, even a solid black line starts to look a bit ragged and, as stated above, a grey line will be even more ragged.

With photos, the situation is different, because they do not contain crisp lines. A photo is broken up into rosettes at 150 per inch, but the shape of the rosettes does not have to be that of a simple, circular blob. In this way, the rosettes can inherit some detail from the photo at more than 150 pixels/inch. The limit is about 300 ppi, so we ask for photos at 350 ppi to give us some headroom.

The salient point is that photo of a cave survey would look awful, as it would be composed of rosettes at 150 per inch throughout. Line graphics (and text) require a higher resolution in order to look crisp. This is the basis behind our requirements for surveys - the text and lines must be solid, to avoid them going through the half-tone process, and the resolution must be much higher than it is for photos, so that the edges are crisp. This is also the reason why we say that, if you supply a bit-map, the lines must not be anti-aliassed (that is, they must not have grey edges). Not only would this make them fuzzy, but it makes it difficult for us to re-colour the lines, if you have supplied them in a colour.