Writing Articles for SILICON CHIP

By LEO SIMPSON

So you have spent countless hours developing a project and now you would like to see it published for all the world to see. Does SILICON CHIP accept articles for publication? Yes, we do. Here are some general guidelines to anyone contemplating writing articles for SILICON CHIP

Want to write for SILICON CHIP? You do? Great. Before you start, let's give you some general guidelines which will make your job easier and will greatly increase the chances that the article will be accepted for publication.

Before you start on that great article concept, please contact us to find out whether it is of interest to the readers. We would hate it if you had put in an enormous amount of work to produce an article only to find that we reject it because it is not of sufficient interest to the readers.

There may be other reasons for rejection, of course: we might have a similar article ready or almost ready for publication _ or we might have already given another person the go-ahead for a similar idea.

When you contact us, we will ask you for the general concept. If it is a project, we will want to see a circuit diagram and a brief synopsis on what it does, how it works and how much it might cost. We'd also need to know that any specialised components you have used will be available for other readers to obtain.

Perhaps you would like to submit a feature article. Again, we would like a synopsis; ie, a brief outline of the article. You can contact us by phone or mail but if you can do it by email, please do. Contact us with our Feedback form here.

When emailing, please do NOT attach documents in HTML format. If you wrote your synopsis in Word or another text editor, leave it that way. Opening HTML documents simply takes extra time.

What about money? Yes, we do pay for published articles but there are conditions which we will spell out when you contact us. We generally do not commission articles. We always edit submitted articles and often end up doing substantial re-writes. The amount we have to do affects the overall payment.

Submitting the article itself

These days, we like articles to be submitted as (preferably) Word documents or .txt files on a Zip disk, CD-ROM or floppy disk, formatted for PCs. You can also email articles to us. If you do email us an article, please do it as a text file or as an attached Word file. Any Word attachments you send to us should be virus checked beforehand.

Speaking of viruses, we get a lot of them sent to us in various ways. If you need to send .exe files or zip files please make sure that you run them through the latest virus software such as Norton Anti-Virus. Contributors get very embarrassed when we subsequently inform them that they have a virus.

As a general policy we, like most companies these days, immediately delete any email that comes in with an attached .exe file unless we know (and trust!) the source.

By the way, we often find viruses in submitted material but the contributor swears on a stack of Bibles that they virus check everything. It's only after a bit of quizzing that we find they haven't updated their virus definitions or signatures for months, perhaps years. Please update regularly!

Article format

Please don't make your article look pretty. We want it in plain, unadorned text.

These days, since so many people have Microsoft Word or similar word processing software, there is a great temptation for writers to use fancy fonts and formats, dropped caps, italics, bullets, indented paragraphs, text in various colours and so on. Don't bother!

No matter how fancy your document looks, all that effort in presentation will be dumped because if we do publish it, it will be formatted to suit the magazine. So whether we like your article or not, we have no choice but to dump your formatting. We are only interested in your basic text.

For the same reasons, please do not present your article as a PDF file, a Powerpoint presentation or as files from any desktop package such as Pagemaker, Quark Express, Publisher, etc. We only have to extract the text back out again which once again will lose all your fancy formatting.

Fancy formatting also makes your article much harder to edit and you want to make our job easy, don't you?

OK, maybe you need to include some tables in your article. In that case, we will need the table format (eg, in Word) but please don't send them as Excel or database files.

All of that sounds like a lot of negatives but we really need to keep the whole process simple and that means text files or Word document files.

By the way, regardless of which word processor program you use, they all have a facility for outputting your article as a .txt file (also known as ASCII or plain text). Do not just change the file extension and hope for the best _ the chances are that we won't be able to read it.

That is one really good aspect of email. If you send us an article inserted as a text file, you will be able to read it on the screen, before you click on the "send" button.

Still on word processors: if you have Microsoft Word it is a good idea to make full use of its grammar and spell-checking capabilities. Make sure you have the English dictionary loaded, not the American. Also, it is a good idea to use Word's readability statistics after you have run a spell check.

If you want to make your article as readable as possible, keep the sentences and paragraphs reasonably short. Try to make sentences active, not passive and not too wordy. If the Word "Flesch-Reading Ease" score is below 40 (out of 100), you know you have a problem.

Photographs and graphics

As you can see from most of the articles in SILICON CHIP, we generally like to include plenty of photos and diagrams. So what to do?

While some people do go to the trouble of taking photos of their projects, they are rarely good enough for publication. We much prefer to take our own photos and for that reason (and also to check the operation of your project) we generally prefer to have the prototype submitted to us.

We do return prototypes, whether or not the article is published.

However, we know there are times when it may be impractical or impossible to send us your project and therefore you need to take your own photos.

Almost universally, we work only with digital photos. We can handle 35mm transparencies and prints up to A4 size if we absolutely must but much prefer not having to do so! We cannot handle larger format transparencies.

If you must take your own photos for publication, you really need a single-lens reflex digital camera with separate control over aperture, exposure time and focus. And while modern, automatic cameras might be great for happy-snaps of your family on holidays, they are really not suitable for magazine photography because you have no control over aperture and depth of field.

The general rule of thumb for a digital photo is that if it will fit on a floppy disc (what are they!) it will probably not be good enough for publication. In other words files, regardless of type, need to be at least 1.5MB and preferably larger. As a guide, the photographs you see in SILICON CHIP start out as 3-4MB - jpegs.

Always shoot at the maximum resolution the camera will allow and please don't "Photoshop" any pictures yourself - send us the raw files (ie, straight from camera) so we can process them the way we want them. Send us all the photos you took so we can choose the ones which suit us best. Remember it's far better to shoot at or close to the camera's highest aperture (eg, f22 if your lens goes that far) to get the best depth of field. You may need to open the shutter for a longer time to compensate so a tripod is pretty-much a necessity. Always focus on the leading edges of the object because the depth of field is much better towards the back.

The best medium for supplying digital photos is CD-ROM because these are unaffected by magnetic fields. But they can be fragile: pack the CD very well before sending (sending it to us just in its jewel case is almost guaranteed to have the CD destroyed in the post). The beauty of CDs is that the text for the project can also be included, there is plenty of room for you to include all your photos and CDs today are real cheap!

If you are taking photos of your project, vintage radio or whatever, don't do it on your front lawn, grubby garage floor or against a brick wall. Try to use a neutral background which contrasts with the object you are photographing. You can use a plain or light pastel bedsheet, but make sure it is spotless and has been carefully ironed to take out the creases - remember that the camera will ruthlessly record any blemishes. Remember also that any shiny surfaces on the object being photographed will pick up the background (foreground) colour and can give unwanted colour casts.

Speaking of unwanted colour casts, taking photos under fluorescent light will give a greenish cast while incandescent lighting will give a red cast. Direct sunlight will give very strong shadows which can conceal detail while indirect sunlight can give an overall blue cast. Can't win, can you?

Well, you can, but it is best to be aware of all the traps.

The best light - by far - is outdoors with a lightly overcast sky. Shadows will be minimised or even eliminated and the light is virtually pure white. But sometimes you don't get those overcast days without the rain pouring down!

That is why it is preferable to send us the project and we'll take the photos in our studio. If we mess up, we have to do it again!

Scanned photos

We would very much prefer to scan any photos (or other artwork) ourselves. Scanning is an art, especially when it comes to scanning for reproduction in a magazine.

Circuit diagrams

We need a clear and legible circuit diagram. This can be a pencil sketch or a computer printout but whatever format you provide, we will always redraw it to our standards.

If possible, when you draw your circuit diagram stick to the conventions of inputs on the left, outputs on the right, positive supply rails at the top and negative/ground rails at the bottom.

For capacitors up to 1000pF, please use pF. For capacitors up to 0.1uF, please use nF. For capacitors above 0.1uF, please use uF. We do not use so-called "metricated" abbreviations for resistors - eg, 1k5 meaning 1.5k or R33 for 0.33 ohms. There is less chance of error in conversion if we don't have to convert!

Printed circuit boards

If you have produced a PC board we prefer that the pattern be drawn in Protel or any version of PC board layout software compatible with Protel: Easytrax, Autotrax, or Circuit Maker.

If you design your PC board in another package (eg Eagle, Ivex, etc), we will need an EPS output of each layer - board layer and component layer for a single-sided board.

Designing PC boards is a separate topic in itself and we hope to feature an article on this subject shortly. However, as a general rule, keep components more or less evenly spaced on a 50-thou grid (typical) and parallel to the sides of the board; don't have diagonal components - it doesn't look right.

Other points to consider:

(a) circuit components must be readily available and reasonable in cost.
(b) 240VAC wiring must be safe and comply with all relevant codes.