MacNews works best when we get articles from our members. Each of you has a unique perspective on how you use your Mac. We would all love to read about your favorite new peripheral or experience with a product or service. Your article doesn't have to be long. Even a paragraph or two can always be used. It can even be a mini-review.

Our preferred format for receiving your text is Microsoft Word. Most word processors including AppleWorks and Pages can save/export in Word format. If you don't have anything that can save in Word format then save/export in .rtf or .txt format.

If you really want to help us out, then it would be great if you used Microsoft Word Style Sheets. It's not required, but it would speed up our layout process greatly. It doesn't really matter what fonts you use, what matters is that you name your style sheets EXACTLY as we have named ours. They are case sensitive:

headline (name of the article)
by line (your name - email address is optional, but if you include one put it on the same line)
Body 1st (the first paragraph of your article)
Subhead (use subheads if you want to break up the article into sections)
Body (re remaining paragraphs of your article)
URL (put your web links in separate paragraphs)
caption (if your images require captions, use this style for the text to go with your image)

You can use this Word template

There really is no minimum word count, however it would be best if you wrote no more than 1,500 words at the absolute most. That's roughly 4 pages of text with images. We're not looking for essays.

I'm not going to lie to you, by the time we get everything in and ready to layout, there is very little time to proofread the articles that come in from others. Therefore I encourage you to run a spell check and get someone to read it over for you. You'd be surprised at how many people that you know, would be willing to line up to point out your mistakes :-) In all seriousness, a loved one could give a quick once over and catch the most common typos.

Articles are much more interesting to read when you supply images to go along with what you're writing about. We ask that you NOT imbed the images in the actual Word document, but send them along separately. If you require your images to go in specific spots with your text then call out the images in your text and we'll try to put them as close as possible to where you want them to be.

A picture of the author (YOU) is always appreciated!

Photos ideally should be 144 ppi/dpi at actual size in RGB format.

We accept the following image formats: .psd .ai .tif .eps .pict .pdf .jpg
Other formats may work, but they may also cause extra work on our end.

Once you have the article written and the images together in a folder, click the folder to select it and then choose Create Archive from the Action menu at the top of the Finder window. This will create a .zip file. You can then send it as an attachment via email to MacNews.