Writing for Position

Would you like to write for Position Magazine? The following note is a compendium of tips and advice. If you read this carefully it is more likely you will turn out readable copy. It tells you something about our audience, and gives some tips on how to organise your thoughts before you start to write.

Position Magazine has a circulation of between 6000 and 7000, depending on conference distribution. Most of our circulation is to members of the Spatial Sciences Institute, as part of their membership. Members of the Institution of Surveyors also receive the magazine under an agreement with the SSI.

Most of the circulation is currently within Australia and New Zealand.

You should note that our readership includes an extremely diverse professional group, linked only by an interest in land information. You should therefore not assume that readers are familiar with the jargon, politics, technology or methodologies peculiar to your industry. All acronyms, except GIS, GPS, NASA and CSIRO should be spelt out, and where necessary, explained.

Try to write in a chatty, non-academic style. Position is not an academic journal. Our role in life is to convince people that this technology is interesting, important and useful, and our articles should always attempt to convey something of the excitement that drives the industry.

It is useful to begin a paper by outlining the problem as you see it, explaining why it should be of concern, then by telling us how you solved the problem.

The preferred length is about 1500 words. In any event, try to keep your copy below 2000 words.

Please do not use sub-headings or references. If you really need to refer to prior work, refer to it explicitly in the text.

Your copy may be edited for reasons of style, length and consistency. Where significant alterations are made, an author's copy will be returned to you for verification. Our style guide is available here and covers things such as spelling, puntuation, dates, times, how to refer to companies and products, and so on.

We take pride in the quality of our presentation, and we therefore ask authors to be aware of the need for interesting photographs that add something to the information content of an article. Photographs of people mentioned in the story are appropriate. Location shots are especially important.

We accept hard copy imagery, however we prefer electronic images. Electronic images should be sent by CD or email. We find .JPG format works best. But note that all electronic formats give poor quality reproduction if they are printed at less than 300 dpi. To determine how big an image will be on the page in millimetres, it is therefore necessary to determine the number of pixels, and divide by 12. So, for instance, a 900 pixel by 600 pixel image will wind up 76 mm x 46 mm, or smaller, on our page. Our pages are 200 mm wide by 300 mm high, regardless of how you format or size the image. (Note it’s easy enough to tell the number of pixels in the image by checking the thumbnail in file explorer, or right clicking an image to obtain its properties.

As a general rule, our graphic designer will run shots of computer screens, or shots of faces, about the width of a column, i.e: 60 mm or so (implying the image should be 720 pixels wide). Landscapes, satellite imagery, maps etc we would generally want at least the width of the page – about 2400 pixels wide.

Some image processing programs give you the ability to resample an image, so you can arbitarily set the size and resolution. Withstand the temptation to do this. All that happens is that the same information is smeared across a large number of pixels. If our designer then tries to resize the image, we loose more information.

All text must be sent to us electronically. We regret we cannot accept hard-copy. We cannot accept Apple discs. All copy must be in Microsoft .DOC format, or Ms-DOS ASCII text format, with all formatting removed. Note that all word processors have the ability to export files as ASCII. This is usually denoted by a .TXT extension. To confirm that you have copy in the correct format, enter "type <filename>" at the DOS prompt. If you get garbage, that is what we get too.

Please note. Do not send us .DOC files laid out with your favourite fonts and headings and the text nicely wrapped around the images. It drives everybody here nuts, especially our graphic designer.

Please, Please note: there is a special place in hell reserved for people who send us material using PDF. Don’t go there. It takes us hours of messing about to unbundle it, so we can do something with it. We will probably return it to you.

If you have any further questions, please phone or email the editor.