Don’t put broccoli into your Word document!

As professional typesetters, one of the questions we’re often asked is how to indicate where pictures should go in a manuscript. Pasting them all into Word can make the document unwieldy, and it does not replace supplying the separate original image files for production.

In the video above, we show how to indicate where pictures and captions should go in your manuscript, and what happens when the Word file is imported into InDesign for typesetting.

Preparing the Images

It’s important to make the intended crop clear. If an image is to occupy 5 cm × 3 cm, specify that size and the part of the image to retain, without unwanted white space around it. Supply the highest-resolution original; do not reduce its pixel dimensions merely to match the intended printed size.

The video below demonstrates the importance of trimming your images appropriately.

Also, very important, if you want a border on your image, make sure that the border is not in the original file, and that you give an instruction that a border of, say, ½ pt should be on the images. The reason for this is that when images are resized, then if the border is within the image, the border width will be inconsistent across images.

When naming images for our import workflow, we recommend ordinary English letters and numbers, avoiding apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, underscores and dashes. Keep the correct filename extension, such as .jpg for a JPEG file. Renaming an extension does not convert the image to another format. If Windows hides the extensions, make them visible before checking the filenames.

For those who are proficient in Word paragraph styles*, the best way is to put the name of the file, including the extension as its own paragraph and then, if the picture has a caption, put the caption text as a new paragraph. After that, simply apply the paragraph styles “picture” and “caption text” respectively.

Typesetting

In the first draft of the document, the images will be placed at the full-text width (unless the quality of the image is too low, in which case it will be placed at the maximum size possible so as not to compromise quality).

The next stage is to mark the PDF with the required image width or height, including the unit: for example, “width 50 mm”, “height 30 mm” or “width 2 in”. You can also request “width 66%” to make the image occupy 66% of the text-block width.

If you want several images to appear on one line, this can be indicated by simply writing “merge 4 images” or something similar. Watch this 2-minute video to see what happens or for more detail, see this post.

When there are two images, often in landscape format, and they need to be one above the other on the same page this can be achieved by making both images smaller such that the width is the same for both images. Sometimes the proportions of both images are very different, and this does not look very attractive – one image might be squarer or portrait. This can be solved by resizing both images such that the area of both images is the same rather than the width. You can request this by simply writing “merge widths” or “merge area” on the first image and that image and the next will be resized accordingly. Here is a screencast demonstrating merging both horizontally and vertically (click to play):

*For those unfamiliar with how to apply Word paragraph styles, check out this handy video that will show you what they are and how to use them.

If you have a manuscript where you have lots of broccoli in it (or perhaps no pictures at all) then contact us for a no-obligation discussion.