HOWTO: article submissions

A well formatted article is easier and more pleasant to read and should be easier for site users to quickly print off a readable copy. So a little extra work is worth it.

Many articles submitted to the library have been scanned in from hard copies of varying quality; the lower the quality of the original source book or magazine the initial scan comes from, the more errors needing correction in the scanned text. So proofread the scanned text as necessary for mistakes to be corrected.

Submitting and formatting

First, take a look at a formatted article - http://libcom.org/library/reds-green-short-tour-clerkenwell-radicalism. This will give you an idea of what we are talking about below. Also read the formatting guides for news and Library and History.

Submitting text/article
1) Click on 'create content' at top of page.
2) Click on library, history or news. This will take you to the appropriate page.
3) Type in the title of the article in the 1st box. This should use normal sentence case. I.e. "Strike continues at Ford". Rather than "Strike Continues at Ford".
4) Choose the appropriate categories for the article in the 'regions' and 'sectors' list. (If you are unsure on the correct choice, it can be done by an editor after submission.)
5) Enter a brief explanation of the article in the 'Introduction' box. If appropriate, this could be the 1st paragraph of the article. Otherwise, write a short descriptive summary of no more than 2-3 sentences. This will appear at the beginning of the article in bold type in the finished submission.
6) Paste in the article itself to the 'Body' box.

For example:

Title:
The Chinese anarchist movement
Introduction:
A history of the Chinese anarchist movement in France, Japan and China itself from 1900 up to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party.

For formatting text in articles, please see our BBCODE and HTML FAQ.

Some articles in their original format have too many line breaks. to correct this use a site like this one; http://www.fwointl.com/FWOFormatter.html
- and set max characters to 999999 and Format.

Also ensure that you use (two) full line breaks for paragraphs to ensure readable text. One line break will not get caught by our automatic paragraph formatting.

Footnotes
Footnotes can be automatically generated at the end of articles. Where you would normally put the footnote number like [1] instead, put the text of your footnote wrapped in <fn>Footnote goes here</fn> tags. When you submit the article, Drupal will find all the footnotes and format the superscript numbers and link to them for you.

Submitting images
1. Use jpg or png files only.
2. Give the file a meaningful name.
3. Don't upload files over one MB. If you can only find a large version of a pic, various resizing applications can be found online, or download (http://gimp.org is a good one)
4. Do not use copyright images, and especially not copyright images from news agencies like AP.

Instructions for windows users:
To submit a main image that will appear at the top of the article, use the 'Image' box.
You will need to have the image stored locally on your computer.
Click the 'browse' button to browse your PC to find where you have stored the image. A 'file upload' window will appear.
Browse to the file on your computer, images downloaded from the internet usually default to your "Desktop" folder
Click 'Open' and the file will appear in the 'Image' field on the Libcom submissions page.
Then press 'Upload' to bring the image file from your PC onto the site and into the article.
Then you can add, if you want to, in the "title" field, a caption for your image. This caption will appear when readers hover their mouse over the image.

Finally...
When possible, always provide the source of the article and the date of publication.