Contributing to The WROCC
The articles in The WROCC are mostly written by Club members, although anyone is welcome to submit material. For each issue that contains one or more of their contributions, members get an additional month added to their subscription. In addition, members and non-members alike are eligible to be considered for the annual Contributors’ Award, which is presented at the Annual General Meeting in February.
How to contribute
We can accept material for publication in many formats. Short items, such as Feedback, can just be sent in as an email to the Editor (using the address given on the back page of every issue, or contact us if you’re not a member) whilst larger items are best sent in as a document file of some kind. All contributions will be edited into the ‘house style’ that the newsletter uses (see the Style Guide), so don’t worry about layout and formatting – it’s the words that matter.
The newsletter is produced in Ovation Pro, and contributions produced in the following RISC OS applications are fine:
- Ovation Pro (which is now freely available to download), either as standard documents or in DDL format. The older Ovation is also OK.
- Impression Style (available via the PlingStore), Publisher or Publisher Plus, either in the single file or directory format. We can probably handle Impression X as well, but please contact us first before sending documents in this format.
- EasiWriter and TechWriter.
- PipeDream.
- Fireworkz (we can probably handle Fireworkz Pro documents, too, but please don’t use features specific to that version).
If you’re working on another platform, then the DOC, DOCX and ODT formats (MS Office, LibreOffice, OpenOffice) are all OK. However, please stick to inline text and avoid things like embedded frames.
If all else fails, plain text is always an option!
What about graphics?
A picture says a thousand words – and apart from that, it can help break up a page of text!
When sending in graphics, stick to standard formats: JPEGs for photographs and PNGs or sprites for anything else, with as much resolution as possible. For vector graphics, either ArtWorks or drawfiles are fine.
Images can be included in the article document along with the text or sent as separate files – but remember that all submissions are ‘dismantled’ into their constituent parts before layout, so there’s no point spending time carefully flowing text around the graphics. Supplying the image files separately is often the easiest approach.
When taking screenshots of windows, please ensure that all of the window furniture is included and the sprites are in a ‘backwards compatible’ format. These are both tricky in Paint, but using the free Snapper in ‘window’ mode with its “Save sprite in RO 3.5 format” option ticked solves both problems.
