Article: 140835 of alt.peeves From: feorag@pc.antipope.org (Feorag NicBhride) Newsgroups: alt.peeves Subject: The Trypesetter's Rant Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 02:08:17 +0100 Organization: Pagan Prattle Message-ID: Reply-To: feorag @ nospam . antipope . org NNTP-Posting-Host: antipope.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: antipope.demon.co.uk:158.152.11.49 X-Trace: news.demon.co.uk 958525773 nnrp-02:25218 NO-IDENT antipope.demon.co.uk:158.152.11.49 X-Complaints-To: abuse@demon.net User-Agent: slrn/0.9.5.7 (UNIX) Lines: 106 Path: news1.meer.net!news3.best.com!news2.best.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.icl.net!dispose.news.demon.net!demon!news.demon.co.uk!demon!antipope.demon.co.uk!feorag Xref: news1.meer.net alt.peeves:140835 "Whenever you have need of money, once in the month, and better it be when the moon is dark, then shall you assemble in some messy place and prepare the Magazine, for the queans and the bitches..." I rather enjoy the job-on-the-side. Or rather, I enjoy the proceeds - it's why I was able to attend the Chicago 'fest. There's also the warm fuzzies associated with doing something of value to the community, even if they are an ungrateful bunch of illiterate faggots who prefer the one-handed type of reading. But, like all great works, it comes with peeves - in this case the contributors, many of whom are drawn from the aforementioned bunch of illiterate faggots. Those who can write tend to be a little vague on the technical side of things - like how to get their well-crafted words to me. Production weekend is imminent, and so I sent the following to the mailing list for contributors: Important note: For some reason, your humble trypesetter is *always* pre-menstrual during the magazine's production. For you really sheletered types who've never even looked at a woman, never mind known one in any detail, this means that the tiniest of things can make me want to come round to your place, rip off your head, shit in the hole and then be cleared of all charges on grounds of diminished responsibility. So what are these little things? Well, telling you everything would ruin my fun, so here're the ones which have irritated me from the latest edition. I am more than happy to accept copy by e-mail (at this address only, please), but there are certain things which need to be taken into account. Copy should be sent to me as an attachment, not as included text, to reduce the probablility that it arrives munged. I like Word 4, RTF and plain text formats as these are easiest to deal with. If you send text, I do not want to see line breaks every 70 characters or so because this is a pain to deal with. It's even worse if it has both line breaks and a single return between paragraphs. Please turn off "smart quotes" - they usually get munged in transit and I have a nice little extension whch automatically turns straight ones into bent ones anyway. The same applies to the ellipsis - just put three full stops (not two, or four, but exactly three please) and I'll convert them at this end. If you are using accented characters, put a little bit at the end where you type the character and tell me what it is. This helps me do a search and replace if it got munged. If you're using a Macintosh, you still have to do all this if it's coming via John, as his Windows box will happily munge all the characters before sending it on! Regardless of all this, the Editor needs a plain text copy sent as included text, not as an attachment. The magazine is written in English, with bits of Scots, Gaelic and even the odd bit of French from Ms. Hutton. Please run a spelling checker over your work before sending it, and remember to tell it that it's UK English not US. Your work will be subbed, usually by me. The best style to aim for, especially in the scene reports, is a conversational one. This means that contractions like "don't" and "he'd" are positively encouraged - they're shorter too. Stick with direct forms of the verbs. Write "Ms. Grumpy still plans to open a club in Glasgow" not "Ms. Grumpy is still planning to open a club...". Please note that exclamation marks and question marks come singly and do not require a full stop after them as it's already included. About the only acceptable combination is one of each, and this should be used sparingly. If you don't like the fact that large chunks of your wonderful article get chopped out by the patent dewaffler, write less. Learn to say what needs to be said in as few words as you can and leave out anything which you said last month, and the month before. As the person most guilty of this also has her very own webshite, I suggest she considers plugging an unexpurgated version there as a supplement to her piece in the mag. Coversely, if you are fed up with trains, planes and telephone exchanges appearing on your page, consider writing slightly more, or better still, give us some scene photographs. I have a very nice picture of a plate attached to some old airstairs, showing the settings for all sorts of early jet transports. If you have some pictures, and you want to scan them youself, remember that they need to have a resolution of 200 dots per inch to screen properly so make them big enough to allow this after cropping. If you have lots of pictures, write them onto a CD and bung them in the post. I don't want a huge phone bill for downloading, and I really don't have time to get them from a web site (where the resolution is usually too low anyway). Do not, under any circumstances, think it's clever to send me a Word document with the pictures in place. I will come round and demonstrate how much of a pain this is by shoving your computer up your arse. Without lube. We are not scared of rude words. If you want to fucking swear then just use the bloody swearwords and don't bowdlerise the bastards, or put in shitty little asterisks, unless you are quoting some other wimp of a publication. bb Feorag -- feorag at nospam.antipope.org "Bung some barley-sugar in hot water, spice it up with a close relative of cannabis, and *** allow it to go mouldy. Drink the result."