Styles of markup

What is markup?

Markup is essentially the method by which elements of a manuscript are identified. For instance, all chapter headings would receive the same markup; that is, the same symbols, codes or device is used for each chapter head to indicate they are the same type of element within the manuscript. The type of markup used depends on many factors. If the manuscript is in digital form the markup will be of a different type than if it is a hardcopy version. There is no right or wrong method of markup, although some conventions have been established over the years.

Hardcopy markup

When a manuscipt is edited on paper hardcopy, which is still commonplace, there are several basic systems which can be employed. Often these systems are used together. For example, colour highlighting pens are often used to indicate large chunks of text which should be placed in a box. Within the same manuscript, tagging may be used to indicate the heading levels, most commonly denoted by uppercase letters.

Tagging can also refer more generically to the concept of indicating the different elements of a manuscript using codes. This involves a defined list of codes used by the editor to tag paragraphs of the manuscript as being of the same type. For instance, all boxed material may be marked up with the tag ‘<BX>’. This same method is employed in onscreen editing.

Tagging is less commonly used for body text elements. Most editors prefer colour-coding large slabs of text using different coloured highlighter pens.

Tagging is preferred for markup of headings, where different single-character letters are placed in a circle next to heading text to indicate their hierarchical level within the manuscript. Chapter headings are given the A level of heading and subheadings are B, C, D and so on. It is not necessary for all headings to fall within this hierarchy. For instance, table headings may be assigned the letter T and headings within a shaded box may be assigned the letter X. It is only critical for the body text headings to be hierarchical. It is also critical that all headings are marked up, regardless of how obvious it may seem to the copyeditor. Keep in mind that the typesetter may not be reading the text line by line during the manuscript correction phase; instead they will be looking for specific markup. If each element is clearly marked, all phases of production that follow will be more efficient and require less revision.

Markup other than heading levels is best achieved using colour coding. Again, it is important that all elements are marked and that there is clear distinction between the elements. For instance, a manuscript may have two kinds of tables: those within the body of text and those within a box. While these two components are both tables, they belong to different elements of the manuscript and will be formatted differently. Even if they are formatted the same for the project you are working on, it is conceivable (and likely) that the formatting will change in the future, either in electronic form or another printed edition. It is important that a distinction be made. It is easy for a typesetter to create two styles that are equivalent for any one edition; it is harder for them to differentiate them in the future, if required.

Overall, choose a wide range of colours and make a vertical line next to the relevent slabs of text on the paper hardcopy. Supply a guide to the typesetter which indicates what element each colour denotes. Common colour choices are yellow for block quotes, pink for boxes and orange for tables.

Complexity of some manuscripts

Some manuscripts can contain many elements and sub-elements. It is important in these instances for the copyeditor to create a clear and simple structure outline, and to ensure that each element is distinguished. It may also be desirable to remove some of the complexity in favour of a more simplified structure which better explains the content. A common instance in when authors get carried away with boxes. When a manuscript contains more than two kinds of boxes the copyeditor may ask themselves what purpose these boxes serve. Would it be better, for instance, to have a sub-section of text (such as Case Study) which better describes the content. In these instances a separate colour is given to each of the sections and the designer will help to create a visual distinction between the elements. The most important thing to remember is that the copyeditor is charged with the task of ensuring that each element is clearly marked up using tags for headings and colour for text.

Digital markup

Digital markup is most commonly performed onscreen using Microsoft Word. Within Word there is a system called 'stylesheets'. These stylesheets are designed so that elements of a manuscript can be given the same name and also take on the same formatting. In book production, the actual formatting of the stylesheet is of less significance than its name. One way of looking at stylesheets is that they are a kind of invisible tagging markup. Rather than typing in the codes you have created to denote different elements of the manuscript, the stylesheet name is the code and can be assigned as required.

Using stylesheets in Word is strongly recommended, however, few copyeditors have found this to be easier than using hardcopy manuscripts. It is difficult to resist the temptation to fiddle with the visual formatting of the stylesheets and hard to remember that any formatting that is applied will certainly be removed by the typesetter. What is important is the name of the stylesheet. It's name is what groups and distinguishes the different elements. At Bookhouse we use a simple, module stylesheet naming system which essentially makes the distinction between headings and text and allows the names assigned to different sections of text to be re-used with different prefixes.

Simple Stylesheet System

Designed for onscreen editors and the publishers they work for

This section of this site is designed to viewed as a PDF, or MS Word document. You should go here to read this following section.

Basic stylesheet paradigm

Stylesheets are divided into two kinds: text and headings.

The most commonly used style in any manuscript (usually the body copy) is given the highest level in the hierarchy: Text. This paragraph is fully justified and has an indent on the first line. This paragraph you are reading is styled Text.

A paragraph without an indent is called TextF(the Fstands for 'full out'). The first paragraph after a heading is usually TextF, such as above.

In most typesetting models, space is always added before text paragraphs, and never after the paragraph. In Bookhouse's implementation, spaces are also quantified by size (in percentage terms of three digits, denoted by the character S). So, for example, a text paragraph that is full out, with one full line space before it (100%), would be styled TextFS100. The '100' refers to the percentage of one line space that is used. If the paragraph were to have two lines of space, then it would be 200% of one line, or TextFS200. In any one job you may end up with a whole mixture of these tags, such as TextFS050for half (50%) of one line space. The paragraph you are reading is a TextFS100.

Often a paragraph is required to have space before it, but also to have an indent. This would simply mean removing the Ffrom the previous example, that is, TextS100. This paragraph you are reading is styled as a TextS100.

As you can see, there is no need for blank paragraphs to be used as space. In fact, blank paragraphs are a no-no for typesetters. Using a spacing system, only added before paragraphs, reduces the number of styles that have to be created to achieve the final result.

To address the problems of bullet points in Word, turn off automatic list generation by going to the Toolsmenu and selecting AutoCorrect.... In both the AutoFormat as you typeand AutoFormattabs, deselect all options except for Replace straight quotes with smart quotesand Preserve, Styles. This will prevent Word from automatically adding its own stylesheet definitions and generated bullet characters.

There are several elements to a bullet list to be considered. The bullet list stylesheet itself; space before and after the list; the distance away from the left margin the list appears; and whether the paragraph that follows the list is indented or not.

I have chosen to have an indented paragraph after the list, which means a TextS100. As you can see in the above example, the bullets are simply asterisks followed by a tab. This method of formatting is very common in typesetting, and is often referred to as 'hanging indents'. The bullet character is an arbitrary thing in this definition, which could just as easily be a number, for a number list, or a character, for an alpha list. They all use TextHI. HIstands for Handing Indent. An S100is added to the stylesheet name for the first one in the list to create a full line space before the list. TextS100is used afterwards to create one full line space below the list.

One of the other commonly used styles is for quoted material. Quoteis at the top of the hierarchy. QuoteFis for a quoted paragraph that is full out. QuoteFS100 is for a quoted paragraph, full out, with 1 full line space before it, such as this paragraph you are now reading. QuoteFS100is usually the first paragraph of any quote.

Quoteis less often used, unless the quoted material is more than one paragraph..

QuoteFis used for lines of a poem or song.

QuoteS100almost never occurs, but I've thrown it in here to show you that it can easily be used and follows the same system as other classes of stylesheet names.

I think this covers the text elements. This is only a few of them, but you can create your own using the same system. Here are some others which we regularly use:

WBib: Used for bibliographies

WRef: Used for references

TextNote: Used for endnotes

Index0: Main level of index

Index1: First sub level of index

IndexS: The first entry of each letter of the alphabet in the index. You will notice the absence of a percentage in this stylename; that is because the space above each letter in the index will be the same, and therefore differentiating between size of space is irrelevant.

TabText: The text of a table

TabCap: The number which appears in the caption of the table, e.g. Table 1.5

TacCapT: The text that belongs to the Table number, such as 'Annual growth rates for various economies'.

Stylesheet names used in the preliminaries are all preceded by the character Yto group them at the end of the alphabetical stylesheet list, and together in a group, for example:

YHalfTitle1: Half title text

YTtitle1: Title page text

YAuthor1: Author of the book

YCon1: Contents defintion

YCon2: Second contents defintion

You will notice that all of these have a numeral as a suffix. That is because prelim stylesheet definitions do not use descriptors. To make them efficient to use, each style is simply appended by a number, without consideration of its visual definition. This has proven to be a highly effective and efficient way of naming and creating many varied stylesheet definitions.

Heading styles

Heading styles are somewhat simpler. Unlike text styles, heading styles use space above and below the paragraph. Also, they all share the need to be kept with the text that follows them, that is, headings shouldn't appear at the bottom of any column of text without at least 2 lines of type. These differences are actually the way we define the classification of each stylesheet class. On its most fundamental level, all paragraphs are text, but these differences classify whether the text is a heading or not.

As you can see from the stylesheet list that I've provided, the heading tags all begin with 'Head', followed by the alpha (or alphanumeric) indicator of their order in the hierarchy. HeadA1/HeadA2(chapter headings) and HeadP1/HeadP2(part headings) both have numbers following them to separate the definition of section number numeral and title text.

You will note the use of TextFfollowing all headings in this document. This is commonly a problem with digital manuscripts because they don't differentiate between normal paragraphs and those which come after a heading.

Creating styles easily

The full list of our stylesheet names is not much more robust than what I've provided you here. Also, using the definitions as included in the attached template, you can create other styles that have basic visual functionality.

The most important thing for a typesetter when translating text is the stylesheet name given to each paragraph. Microsoft Word's system is really inconsistent and visually inaccurate. Often it will look like normal text on screen but it will actually have the stylesheet name Heading 2. This happens quite frequently. Because Heading 2is used for normal text, it is very difficult for us to find consistency in the author's typing. Mostly it happens that a book with just A, B and C headings is presented with every stylesheet name from Heading 1to Heading 9, with no consistency of usage. As you can see, there are 6 other stylesheet names that don't match up to unique heading levels. It is hard to translate Word's stylenames when they are used like this. Which makes it better to use your own.

The most important thing to remember is that the stylesheet name is important, and not what it looks like visually. Text that is large and bold but has the stylesheet Text, will print as normal text when typeset. Making a stylesheet, therefore, requires no significant understanding of how to format the text, since only the name is important.

Say, for example, you wanted to create a style that is normal text, full out, with only a half line space before it (since this doesn't exist in this template already). In the Format menu there is an item called Style...You will see the stylesheet list and a button for New...Click here and type in the new name for your stylesheet over the one that is automatically generated, in our example that will be TextFS050. You can leave the process here and a style will be created which looks like Normal stylesheet, but has the name TextFS050. This is sufficient to have the text format correctly at typesetting stage. You can, with one extra little step, create a stylesheet that looks similar to how it should appear.

Word (and Quark) utilises a 'based on' system of creating a stylesheet. The stylesheet names I've provided will form a good basis for most definitions. As in our previous example, TextFS100would be a good basis for TextFS050. Just below where you typed in the name of your new style is a setting for Based on. For the stylesheet you just created this will indicate the stylesheet Normal. If you change this, however, to select TextFS100, you will notice that your paragraph now appears basically as it should; full out, with space above it. Although the amount of space is incorrect, the name is accurate and it has elemental visual properties.

Of course, the next step would be to modify the space to be half of that allocated to TextFS100. You can do this by clicking on the Formatbutton, then selecting Paragraphfrom the list that drops down. One of the settings is for Spacing, Before. Divide this by 2. You will now have a stylesheet that is accurate in terms of name and visual properties.

This is not necessary for a file that is going straight into typesetting, since the visual attributes of the text are not relevant, only the stylesheet names. If, however, you are printing the manuscript for the client (or you are simply a perfectionist) you can perform the extra step necessary to change the visual properties of the style. In most instances this will be only one setting, since each style is different from the one it is based on by only 1 or 2 settings.

Simon Paterson
Bookhouse
71 Burlington Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
02 9439 4040
simonp@bookhouse.com.au