A work in progress, currently skeletal
It may seem like CLAWmarks is something you can just whip up over the weekend, but it really isn't. If you want to do all the things that are necessary to make it look good, it will take up more time than you expect.
Set aside several weekends, preferably a whole month, if you're a lone layout lemur. If you're a student with loads of free time, or if you have minions who have all the right software and can do large portions of the work independently (or, best of all, both of the above), you can probably decrease this time estimate a bit, but it is best to err on the side of caution.
Collect submissions well in advance. Don't wait until you have everything before starting; you will inevitably get some articles and art at the very last minute. As soon as you have the first articles and pictures, do the required pre-processing on them and as much layout as you can - as the deadline approaches you will be glad that you got the menial work out of the way earlier. Trust me.
What software is available to you depends on what operating system you're using. Most people still use Windows and are most familiar with it. Unfortunately, most of the software you need which is available for Windows is heinously expensive. Fortunately it is possible to get trial versions.
If you're set on using Windows, consider installing the Windows port of the standard UNIX utilities. They will help with text processing, a lot! http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/—directions for adding them to your path, here: http://www.kuu.se/unxutils-win.html
If you want to try Scribus, but you're attached to your Windows machine, try a Linux LiveCD which has Scribus on it. There has been a vague proposal that we construct a live CD especially for CLAWmarks editing, with the latest versions of Scribus and the GIMP, as well as fonts, internet utilities and everything else you're likely to need. Nothing definite has come of this yet; if you think this is a good idea and would use such a CD, say something on the Clawnet mailing list.
You need a good image editor, so that you can clean up your source images. Paint is not good enough. You will need something which has a magic selection wand, layers, and a menu with stuff like "levels", "curves" and "brightness/contrast" in it. Your best options are:
Text editors are legion; I can't recommend any for Windows, and on Linux it doesn't really matter what you use because you can easily do all the hardcore searching-and-replacing with scripts anyway.
It is vitally important that your editor (or scripting language) can search and replace well, and can handle special characters. In one case (replacing smart quotes) you will probably have to use a script no matter what, unless you have the most awesome and amazing text editor known to mankind (if you're replacing one million smart quotes by hand, you have a problem). See remarks about UNIX utilities above. More details to follow in the pre-processing section.
Why word processors are not layout programs: You may be wondering why I'm not mentioning Word. Word is a word processor, not a layout program. It was designed to produce continuous bodies of text, and does this reasonably well. It was not designed to create documents full of independent boxes absolutely positioned on different pages, with complicated text wrapping and text flow. It sort of has support for layout, but it's crudely hacked in, and not very pleasant to use. Pick the right tool for the job.
It is helpful to have a program that allows you to browse, install and uninstall fonts efficiently. You can probably live without one, but it will certainly make your life easier.
General tip: Play around with all the software in advance so you don't have to figure out how to do vital things at the last minute.
CLAWmarks is more fun (and quicker) to do in a group, but obviously everyone will need a computer to work on.
You could do almost all the work separately and asynchronously, and only meet for the final arrangement of the laid-out articles, or do all the pre-processing earlier and meet for a longer period to do all the layout. Depending on the skills and inclination of the members of your team, you could have everyone doing a bit of everything or have a dedicated art cleaner, proofreader, etc.
You will need a spelling and grammar fascist to do the proofreading, repeatedly. If there isn't anyone currently on the team who reacts with frothing rage to apostrophe misuse and dangling participles, look further; if necessary, abduct an English major.
Fonts come in a number of different formats. It's not terribly important which specific kind you use, but there is one fact about fonts that you need to watch out for:
Old fonts came in a bitmap format - a set of pixelated images for each specific size the font came in. If you wanted to use a weird in-between size, your program would have to scale the images (sometimes with less than ideal results), and if you blew the text up to a large size you would be able to see the blocks.
Then a new generation of fonts was created - outline fonts, which are stored as vector graphics. You can scale them to any size you like. These are the kinds of fonts you should use. The most popular kinds of outline fonts that you are likely to find are TrueType, OpenType and PostScript.
It is unlikely that you will find any new bitmap fonts on the internet today, but if you have any old fonts lying around on your computer you should make sure that they are outline and not bitmap.
Many, many good quality fonts can be found on the internet for free. However, because free fonts are sometimes dodgy and broken, it's prudent to limit yourself to a couple of reliable sources—preferably small collections made by one person—and only trawl the large archives if you really, really need something very specific (like a font that looks like Scrabble tiles, or 19th century script, or something).
Some links to reliable font collections:
Many free typefaces are designed to be used in decorative titles only, and don't contain any punctuation characters. Some don't even have different characters for uppercase and lowercase letters.
It's a good idea to test print a page with samples of the fonts you intend to use, to make sure that they will print correctly.
You should read this article for a more detailed overview of different kinds of fonts. Here's a brief summary:
A professionally produced typeface which is intended to be used for body text (and not just decorative titles) comes in different variants: roman for the normal font, oblique for the italic version, bold for the... uh... bold version, and sometimes condensed for a narrower, more compact version, light for thinner, heavy for thicker, and assorted combinations of the above, sometimes with extra added if a characteristic is more pronounced.
This is important: each of these variants was individually and lovingly crafted by a font designer, who has ensured that each letter looks exactly right and has tweaked the spacing between the letters appropriately. In contrast, most word processors and layout programs offer fake "bolding" and "italicising", which is simply crude manipulation of a normal typeface to make it uniformly thicker or slanted to the right. It may look OK on your screen, but it will look crappy in print—at best only slightly odd, and at worst horribly pixelated. The correct way to do bolding and italics is to change the font. (See the Wikipedia article.)
Your body text font (which should be serif) will need at least an italic version, because italics are what you should use for emphasis in print (see section on text formatting later). You will probably also need a bold version, for making small titles and headings stand out. For monospace text you will obviously need a different font; pick one which goes well with the body font and is about the same height.
In my personal, highly biased opinion, you should avoid the following fonts like the plague:
A digital image is a collection of tiny squares (pixels). The resolution of an image is how many tiny squares per unit of area are used to make up an image. Better resolution means more information, more detail, and a sharper, cleaner image. (Note: obviously, if you have more information to save, your image file size will be larger.) Better resolution means you can view the image at larger sizes without seeing the pixels. An image which is visibly blocky because it has been blown up to a larger size from a low-res small image is said to be pixelated.
Resolution is measured in dpi, or dots-per-inch. Different output devices have their own resolution, based on how many points they fit into an inch when reproducing an image. Your monitor reproduces images with many tiny points of light (also called pixels). It has a resolution of about 72 dpi, so images which are meant to be displayed on a monitor (like pictures on the web or desktop backgrounds) are made to be 72 dpi. There is no point in making them have better resolution, because your monitor would not be able to display the in-between pixels if you displayed the image at the same apparent magnification. (You could, however, zoom in and still see a smooth image).
Printers and photocopiers reproduce images with tiny dots of black pigment. They can go much, much higher than 72 dpi; 150 and 300 dpi used to be the norm a few years ago, but now it's more like 600 or 1200. A 72 dpi image may look perfectly smooth on your screen, but if you print it out, it's going to look crap and pixelated. This is especially obvious with line art—any jagged edges are very noticeable—and will look particularly bad if the image is surrounded by text (which is vectorised, and thus always printed at the highest resolution possible).
So please, please remember this and scan and save images at a sufficiently high resolution. 300 dpi should be fine for CLAWmarks; in the end the magazine will be photocopied on a very skanky old copier (assuming you print it through the UCT student press), and I don't know if it can even go higher than that. Save yourself the pain of throwing enormous multiple-megabyte images around.
If you have some digital images from the internet which are only 72 dpi, there are various tricks (involving blurring and sharpening filters) that you can use to make them bigger and higher-res without looking disgusting (described later!), but you should not do this unless you really don't have a bigger source image. Don't expect these tricks to give you an image with exactly the same appearance and quality as the smaller one, only bigger. It's not going to happen.
First of all, scan in grayscale. Not, I repeat, not in black and white. Yes, even line art and other drawings. Black and white pictures are not actually black and white; you need grey to provide a smooth transition from the black foreground to the white background. If you scan a picture in black and white, all the edges will look jagged and rough when you print it, no matter how enormous you have made the resolution.
Of course, if you scan the picture in greyscale, the background will probably start off being off-white and not white, and it will be essential (Essential! Trust me!) for you to clean it. This is not very difficult, and is described later.
If you already have some B&W scans, never fear - you can fix them. Assuming they are sufficiently high-res. This is described later.
There are different formats in which images can be saved. They are not equivalent. The formats you probably know best from the internet are GIF and JPEG. Both of them use compression, to make the files smaller (this has always been important on the internet). Both of them use lossy compression. This means that they discard some information when saving a file. They do not store every pixel exactly; instead they store approximations to the original image which are good enough for a human observer.
GIF and JPEG approximate in different ways, and because of the quirks of these methods they do not handle all kinds of images equally well. GIF approximates an image by reducing the range of colours used in it to a simple palette of up to 256 colours. This makes it pretty good for storing clean line art with only a few colours, and pretty crap for storing photos. JPEG approximates an image using wave functions; basically it deduces what colour a pixel should be based on the pixels around it. That makes it good for storing images with continuous gradients of many colours (like photos), and pretty crap for storing line art (which has sharp edges!).
So remember, GIF is for line art. JPEG is for photographs. If you save a photo as a GIF, it will end up looking grainy like it's 1996 (it's less bad for greyscale, but still pretty ugly), and if you use JPEG to save line art, you will get mysterious blobs, squares and other artifacts appearing around edges all over your picture. (If you use the maximum quality, which I think means no compression at all, you may be able to get away with it.)
Always use the maximum quality when saving a JPEG! I doubt you will ever have the space issues which would make it necessary to do otherwise.
There is a new(ish) web image format called PNG. It uses non-lossy compression, so you can store any image in it without losing any information or running into the quality hassles that you can get with GIF or JPEG. (Note to Word users: I assume that new versions of Microsoft products can handle it by now, but please check. And do a print test. Actually, do a print test with all the formats you're planning to use, just in case.) PNG can also handle true transparency (that is, partially transparent pixels, allowing for a gradient), unlike GIF (which can only make pixels completely transparent); if you're using a program for layout which can also understand transparency in pictures, you can achieve some funky effects.
Layout professionals use various uncompressed formats when working with images, but you probably don't need to bother (unless you're saving something as a layered Photoshop or GIMP file while working with it).
Use a spellchecker to catch obvious errors. Then have someone who is meticulous about spelling and grammar go over all the articles and fix mistakes. Better still, have several people do it.
Replace punctuation with correct printing punctuation. There are some symbols for which there are special characters. In plain text documents, people generally approximate them with similar characters which are found in the ASCII character set. You should make sure that the final document uses the proper characters.
There are also conventions for leaving spaces and newlines (which some people also use in formatted text, out of habit) which look terrible if they are left in a printed and formatted document.
Most of these changes can be made with a simple search-and-replace.
Here is what I hope is an exhaustive list. The most important items are in bold.
Proofread! Have lots of people scan through the articles to check that everything looks fine at this stage.
Somewhere in your image program there is a menu which lets you select whether the image should be treated as RGB colour (a normal colour image with the full range of possible colours), grayscale (greys only; what you will usually want for CLAWmarks) or indexed colour (colours picked from the limited palette of 256 basic colours).
Always change the colour mode before working with a GIF! GIFs are automatically opened in indexed colour mode by Photoshop and the GIMP. It is a bad idea to let the program enforce the palette on the fly; bad things happen. If you resize an indexed colour picture it can become really horribly pixelated, and I think neither Photoshop nor the GIMP will let you run filters on an indexed colour image. After you open the GIF, change the mode to greyscale. After you have finished editing the image, if you save it as a GIF again it will get converted back to indexed colour for you.
As mentioned earlier, pick a resolution and stick to it. You can resize images to different resolutions in a good image editor. The resizing dialog will probably show the print size, the actual pixel dimensions and the resolution, and you will be able to change any of these. Make sure that the print size is set to the size you want the picture to appear on the page, and that the resolution is set to the resolution you have picked. (Beware; some programs assume that you want the pixel dimensions to stay fixed, and if you change one of the other values it will change the other one to compensate.)
What is an appropriate size? If you don't know how you're going to use a picture, leave it at the same size and resize it later.
As a rule of thumb, pictures which you embed in a page of text should be as wide as some multiple of the width of one column on that page. If the picture is rectangular, you will then be able to fit it across an entire column (or several columns) exactly, and if you're wrapping text around it you will be able to put it between two columns and leave enough space around it for the text to flow well.
If you shrink a picture and then discover that it is too small, you'll need to resize the original down to the correct size; if you blow up the small picture you will lose quality.
This is very important. The image background may look white on the screen, but it is probably a very light grey, and probably has smudges and speckles, and unless you clean it you will get an image in light grey box when you actually print it.
Photoshop and GIMP have a magic wand selection tool which can be used to select contiguous areas of the same colour (or approximately the same colour).
There are two filters which you should know about: "Gaussian blur" and "unsharp mask". Any good image editor should have them. GB is the best tool for blurring, and UM is the best tool for sharpening. If, for whatever reason, you have an image which has nasty pixelated edges, you can make it look a lot better by blurring and sharpening. If the image is sufficiently high-res, you may not even notice anything unusual about it afterwards, especially if it's a drawing. If you do this to photos they will end up having a slightly stylised, painted look—but they will look considerably better, especially in print.
You should have a preview window in the control panel of each filter. Blur as little as possible, but enough that the pixelation is completely broken up and stops being visible. Experiment with different radii. Play around with the options in the unsharp mask control panel until you have something which looks good.
Don't use brightness and contrast to adjust the lightess and darkness of images. Using levels works a lot better.
Somewhere near the colour mode settings you should find the levels setting. It controls the distribution of different colours in the image, and you can use it to normalize an image which is too red, too green, too light or dark, etc.. You will be using grayscale images for CLAWmarks, so don't worry about the colours.
Somewhere in the control panel there should be an "auto" button which tries to adjust the image automatically; this should be sufficient most of the time. Here is a brief explanation of how the rest of the panel works, in case it is not:
The levels control panel will show you a histogram of how much of each shade of grey is used in the image. Below the histogram you should see three sliders; one at each end and one in the middle. The left-most one marks the position of black, the right one is white and the middle one is the middle tone of grey. By moving these sliders around, you can define what you want the distribution to look like.
To make the lightest grey actually white, move the right slider down to the edge of the histogram on the right, and do the same on the left to make the darkest grey actually black. To make the image lighter, move the middle slider to the left, and to make it darker move it to the right. (This may seem counter-intuitive; what you're doing is specifying that you want more or fewer of the greys to be lighter than the midtone.)
Leave enough space around everything, including page numbers, to allow for the fact that printers don't print right to the edge. You should not use huge margins, though; one centimetre is fine.
Have more than one! Open any approximately A4-sized magazine. What do you see? Columns. Why bother with them?
How many columns you should use depends on the font size of the body text, and what images you plan to put in. You can mix different column numbers in the same two page spread, and definitely have varying numbers throughout the magazine. For 10pt body text two or three is ideal; for a smaller font size you can do four and maybe five. Try four or five in the classifieds, to make them look more like real classifieds.
An exception to the rule: If you're going to put large images down one side (or both sides) of the page, and it's going to take up about half the width of the page, you can leave the text in a single column; it will end up narrower anyway. (As a general guideline, you can drop the number of columns if you're filling up space with an image, another box of text, etc..)
Centering and right-aligning should be self-explanatory. Most layout programs (and word processors) let you "justify" text, making each line stretch the entire width of the column. This may look good or bad; use your discretion. Justified text may look neater, but there's nothing particularly wrong with a ragged left edge. There's a new, improved version of this alignment which does not affect the last line of each paragraph (which is usually much shorter than a full line and looks really stupid when it is stretched out).
Word users beware; the default font size of 12pt is too big for normal body text (although I have used it for some short pieces like the editorial). I recommend 10pt as your default. If you have a really, really long article and little space, shrink it to 8pt or 9pt; it'll still be legible. Just increase the number of columns, or it will look strange.
Make the titles nice and big; I usually fitted them to the width of the page. If the title is too short for that, try only putting it across the top of one or two columns.
Don't cram a billion fonts onto the same page.
I suggest using one body font throughout (at least for all the ordinary full-length articles). Make it something clean and legible. Resist the temptation to use a weird curly or spiky font for the body text of any article; it may look really cool, but nobody will be able to read it!
If this was a boring magazine about agriculture or stock trends, you would be using the same font for everything, but since this is CLAWmarks, it is highly recommended that you go wild with the titles; they are an excellent opportunity to showcase the coolest and weirdest fonts you have found on the internet. And it doesn't matter if nobody can make out the titles, because they will be written in a normal font in the contents.
Separate paragraphs from each other by putting a small distance between them, or indenting the first line of each paragraph, or both. The distance does not have to be very large. Pick one style and use it throughout.
Some word processors automatically format numbered and bulleted lists for you so that each paragraph is indented and there's a number (or bullet) hanging on the left (the way that lists are formatted in html). You can follow this simple procedure to replicate this formatting in any parapraph you like. For example, you may want to format some kind of definition list and have a whole word on the left of the paragraph.
Remember that the magazine will end up passing through the dodgy UCT copier. It does not reproduce shades of grey very faithfully. Depending on how much toner it has and the whim of the operator (I suspect), it can randomly make everything lighter or darker. If you put some text on a grey background, make it no darker than 10% black; that way at worst it will disappear entirely or end up being 20% black, and either way you will still be able to read the text.
Proofread (again)!