Instructions to Authors School of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London

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Templates for Authors

In order to have a house style, several templates have been provided:

• Page style for main course material
• Page style for sub pages within main course material
• Page style for section index
• Page style for course material index

Guidelines for Writing Powder Diffraction Web Pages

The following guidelines should be adhered to, partly in order to have a house style, but also to ease the work in making subsequent updates to the course material:

• Each week's work/lecture is to be self-contained. All relevant files to be kept in a single directory. All hypertext links to be to files within this directory except for main links to course.
• All HTML tags (<...>) to be in uppercase (so that they stand out from the main body of the text, which is generally in lowercase.
• Keep pages short (1-3 printed pages). Large figures (in bytes not pixels) to be put linked in as separate files.
• All file names to conform to ISO9660 standards in length (i.e. 8+3).
• All file names to be given in lowercase: To allow portability in the future. Note VMS and NT are not case sensitive, but Unix systems are, and NT uses whichever case one specifies.
• All lines of text to be kept to less than 80 column width. (Note that some products such as Word usually write out text files with wider lines unless the pagewidth is severely reduced.)
• Avoid use of the header tags H1, H2 etc. Better to use bold tags (<B>) and font tags (e.g. <FONT SIZE=+1 COLOR=#FF0000>).
• Avoid to much use of colour statements since many students will print course material in black and white, the notable exception being the use of colour for photos and diagrams.
• Structure of the work/lecture to be tree-based. Forward links to material not yet released must be avoided at all cost, but some back links are OK (as long as it is clear that they are back links).
• All material to be kosher as far as copyright is concerned. Alternatively, seek permission and acknowledge source.
• Where possible, use either photographs (.jpg) or PostScript vector diagrams (.PS) converted to (.gif). Avoid scanned in diagrams. Hand-drawn scanned-in pictures are not acceptable.
• Symbols to be put in using the symbol font, e.g. <FONT FACE="SYMBOL">q</FONT> results in the letter "q" appearing as greek character theta "q". A table showing the symbol font is available in release 1.

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