What does it take to be the editor of the SJAA Ephemeris?

Here is what we do each month.

On the 10th (or shortly thereafter) each month, we gather the submissions that we have for the next month's issue. This usually includes:

a) An Article from NASA Space Place. These actually arrive around the 12th of the month. We used to be a month behind which meant we didn't have to wait for the new one but now we are caught up.

b) An article from Akkana Peck on the "Shallow Sky".

c) Other articles written by club members or friends of the club. These are all too rare.

d) Possibly someone has sent in an article discussing the next month's general meeting - either a speaker bio or some other information.

e) During the school year, we may get some information from Foothill College, namely from Andy Fraknoi about talks or classes.

f) We may get information from the AANC or ASP or other organizations but often this is not received in time for inclusion.

In addition, there is some information that we know where to find it.

g) The SJAA calendar of events edited by James Van Nuland.

And then there is material that we have to research and write ourselves. How much we have to write depends on how much other material we have.

h) The last month's astronomical news, written to be short and cheeky.

i) Minor tidbits like a good quote or a Q&A used on the inside back cover page.

j) Articles about astronomical topics.

Armed with the above we can start laying out the next edition. We start with the previous month's edition and wipe out everything that is going to be replaced. A few semi-standard items may be used or may not depending on space. This includes the blurb that gives directions to Houge Park.

The page layout program we use is Adobe's InDesign CS3. This particular piece of software is not a requirement. Anyone taking over as editor can choose their own page layout program as long as it can export the result in PDF format. Our printer uses PDF format.

We generally use Adobe fonts. Most text is written using Cronos Pro and headlines are usually written in Kepler. These fonts were donated to the club and they would be passed to the new editor.

Adding the information to the new issue is usually a matter of cut and paste with some exceptions:

1. Almost all material received either has embedded carriage returns where we don't want them or has extras where we don't need them. This is easily solved and thankfully this is a monthly 8 page newsletter and not a daily novella.

2. Photos are usually edited in Adobe Photoshop Elements. For most photos: Save a copy as a JPEG for the HTML version of the newsletter if it doesn't arrive in JPEG format, resize the photo to the size wanted in the newsletter (this can be done later but we like to do it here), use automatic color correction - undo it if it doesn't help, save as a TIFF file. Layout programs tend to like TIFF format although this might be less important with the latest software. At the same time, make another copy of the file (also in TIFF format) but set the mode to "grayscale" and use automatic contrast correction if it improves the picture. This grayscale version will be used for the printed version of the Ephemeris. If the original photo was in black and white, then you obviously don't need the color version. If the photo contained text, resizing might make it unreadable. If the original JPEG file is rather large then use Photoshop Elements to make a small version(100-150 pixels) for use as a thumbnail.

3. There are special formats and styles used for some things including the Last Month in Astronomy column. This is simply a matter of selecting text and picking a style. URLs are set up the same way so that the hyperlink is clickable from either the PDF file or the HTML files.

Then the PDF version of the newsletter is made available to the SJAA board. Corrections are made and then an e-mail is sent to the printer to tell them that the SJAA Ephemeris is ready for printing. Now there are just two more things left to do each month.

A) Copy the PDF version to the location pointed to by http://ephemeris.sjaa.net/current.pdf. We try to do this about the time the issue goes to the printer.

B) Make an HTML version of the newsletter. We try to do this by the end of the month.

To produce the HTML version we:

1) Save each article to a text file: a.txt, b.txt, c.txt, �

2) Edit a file that lists each article.

3) Use that file list in a (currently) Perl script that uses an HTML template and fills in the title and byline. So now we have files named a.html, b.html, c.html, �

4) We created a small windows program that takes *.txt files and creates *.txtfix files. The fixed text handles characters and URLs that need special treatment in HTML.

5) That same program has another function that takes *.html files and inserts the appropriate *.txtfix files.

6) If an article has a pullquote or a picture, that requires some minor editing of the .html file.

7) Other minor editing of the *.html files is possible but we try to keep that to a minimum for sanity�s sake.

8) The Perl script mentioned above creates a block of text that gets inserted into the index.htm file on the Ephemeris website. Minor editing is done here.

Does this sound like a lot? It some sense it does require a wide sprinkling of knowledge but not a lot of depth. Send questions to ephemeris(at)sjaa.net