Page 6 - Autumn 2019

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COMPILING THE MAGAZINE
COMPILING THE MAGAZINE
6
I have been asked about the procedure for compil-
ing the magazine and I’m not sure where to start but
I would stress the following is a brief outline only that
sums up about a month’s work, or more as the bits
come in. No hankies please!
However, like Mrs Beaton’s Rabbit Stew
recipe, it starts with “first catch your Rabbit!” In other
words, I need the copy/news in order to start com-
piling all the pages.
When people email their stories etc. I try but
don’t always succeed in compiling a draft of the ar-
ticle and download the photos making any neces-
sary adjustments to the latter. This can be lightening
or darkening the photos, cropping them to a suitable
size and changing the photo format from RGB (Red,
Green, Blue), to CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow &
Key, which is Black) as this is required for colour printing.
Often, the biggest problem I have is with photos. Photos must be separate and original
from the Camera but a number of people write an article, trying to be helpful no doubt, mainly
in word, and alter the photos in some way. I have the Devil’s own job of trying to extract them
from word and it proves impossible. As I will repeat later, I need the original photos as they come
from the camera. I previously wrote an article about taking photos but some people still ignore
my “advice”.
I then compile a list of pages on a spreadsheet so I can know exactly how many pages I
have and I can work out how to fit them together. Sadly, a number of these can be half or frac-
tions of a page. Half is easy I suppose but what about 1.65 pages or 1.33 pages or perhaps a
quarter of a page? This is where I have the fun of fitting everything together, so I end up with
whole pages the total of which must be divisible by four. This is the way printers must have
them, i.e. 32, 36, 40, 44 and 48. If I have an uneven number then I must find a filler article(s) or
hold over more recent item to the next issue.
As to each page, they must be spellchecked and carefully read for content. In order to
make things fit or read better, I sometimes do a little re-wording but I am generally reluctant to
do this, but sometimes I have to. As to spellchecking, I certainly do not do this myself, I use Mi-
crosoft Word, which also checks the English at the same time. With the latter I do not always
accept Word’s suggestions, preferring to accept the original phrasing or a small re-write.
Photos of course give pages a life. In school and college, the mantra was that a picture is
worth a thousand words. Personally, I would prefer both. To make the text fit on a page, I some-
times resize photos up or down as necessary to change the text space but not making them too
large or small. I can also increase the gaps between lines.
Once I have the right number of pages, I have to save them as page 1, 2, 3 and so on.
Multipage articles have to be split into sin-
gle pages, which is a time-consuming effort
as my magazine software has the odd
problem with the overall amount of text in
splitting pages.
Once I have my total number of
pages or whatever, I have to convert each English
English
Language
page into a.pdf file so the printers have the Language
Dept.
Dept.
correct format but I then have to compile all
of the pages into one single .pdf so that the
printers are able to print the magazine from
the file I email them.