Pokitto Magazine Article Submission Guidelines

The first submission is in! And to help others who intend to, or are curious how, to submit articles for the Pokitto Magazine, I am making this topic as a simple sort of how-to for contributing.

Currently there are 2 best ways to submit articles. Since I am the one collecting and assembling the final format, I will be the one receiving the article submissions.
I would prefer they come in one of two forms:

  1. Probably the best way, submit as an ODT file format. ODF wiki This format is preferred for a few reasons. Primarily because I use Fedora Linux, so others familiar with Linux will know how LibreOffice works, and that is my word processor of choice. Also, ODF is a standardized type that works on all platforms with a word processor. If you don’t have one, Libre Office is completely free :+1: I do highly recommend. (I used it to get my Bachelors Degree).
  2. Go ahead and just write the entire article here in the forums! I can easily copy paste and make the edits necessary to get the article into the final PDF.

Once you have one of these two formats ready, go ahead and just PM it to me here in the forums. We can then continue discussing potential edits and such before finalizing. By potential edits and discussion, I mean collaborating on fixes, I do NOT intend to be an editing dictator and force massive amounts of edits. What I intend is to work with the community for producing content that is of great quality that we can all enjoy! And as suggestions, if you find that the article is good as is, then I’ll add it as you intend :smiley:

A few things to note as for standardizing the look and feel. I will be modifying all text to be the font Liberation Sans at 12pt. If there is something you feel will be lost due to this, make a note or let me know and I will not change certain text. This is just the standard I’ll be using.

Finally, as this is a community magazine and a community project, I will be posting drafts for approval and community suggested changes. I don’t want to finalize anything until the majority of the community (here in the forums and I’ll share on Discord as well) agree that it is ready for release, as this is going to be a great production that will represent the greatest parts of the Pokitto community!

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For the record, Libre Office can open .docx files.
Last I checked the compatibility was very good.

(Which isn’t too surprising, .docx is standardised as part of ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500:2008.
Also It’s basically a renamed .zip with some .xml and optional resource files, much like ODF is.)

I used Libre Office to write all my college essays, which had to be submitted in .docx format.
I only ever had one problem, which was related to putting captions on images.
I suspect they’ve fixed that by now.

(I don’t have a degree of any kind though.)

I used LibreOffice with .docx before too, and had no problems until trying to submit resumes and getting some weird responses back from folks. So, I’ll just stick to .odt

I used LaTeX for my theses :slight_smile:

ODT sounds good – in the recent years I’ve found myself simply using MarkDown for ordinary documents – it’s simple, web/forum compatible, looks good enough by default, has tons of lightweight editors and can be easily edited and read as plain text as well… can also be converted to LaTeX if you want that pro look. The only disadvantage here is that images aren’t embedded.

BTW what typesetting system will be used for the magazine?

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Since I will accept posts from the forums, markdown is an option for sure :slight_smile:

Do you have any specific typesetting in mind?

Nope, just curious, but I think simply using Libre Office can be the best option here, you’ll get some of the entries in that format already. Things like LaTeX, GNU troff or Scribus might be an overkill… too much time investment for too little gain. Do we agree?

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I definitely use Markdown more than I use a word processor these days.

It can’t embed images in the document, but it can link images, which is generally good enough.

I used LaTeX for my master thesis aswell but afterwards I have used LyX to write research papers and my PhD thesis. LyX makes it a bit easier if you have lots of formulas to type in.

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For this round I think it best safe to stick to libre office. For time and my own capability :slight_smile:

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