reclaim education

Notes on the ism's “reclaim education” newspaper.

Synopsis

Reclaim education is a newspaper slash zine slash leaflet (pick whatever you like) reporting about any ISM-related activities. Articles are handed in by activists, got processed into a printable format, and then may be shared worldwide. By this means everybody may get a clue that our efforts are a global matter.
Its format is one DIN-A4-paper. That are two pages duplex. DIN-A4 (210mm×297mm) is a very common paper size in Europe. DIN-A4 is pronounced [diːn eɪ fɔːɹ].

Organization

For the whole organization of every reclaim.education-issue there is a single mailing list: reclaim.education-mailing-list. Feel free to subscribe if you wanna contribute on a regular basis. There is no need to subscribe if you just want to contribute from time to time and don’t wanna get messed up with all the organzational whirl. Just send a mail to the list’s address and it will get approved by a moderator. Please clearly state that you are not on the list if you want to get a reply.

Expectations on authors

There is no application process. As long as there are too few ppl contributing articles there is no way such will be installed.

By contributing texts you are requested to meet following conditions:

  • File articles as simple text-files. That are in Windoze-jargon .txt-files. Do not write them as OpenOffice/LibreOffice-documents. Do not write them as RTF. Hell, do not write them with “MS Word”.
  • The character-encoding is Unicode. Don’t care about this if you don’t understand this.
  • Only use well-known abbreviations if any. Explain uncommon abbreviations and acronyms before first usage. Like this way: “The ISM (Internationl students movement) is a movement.”
  • Use the right quotation marks: That are in English texts “ to start and ” to end quotes.
  • Newspaper articles follow a general structure: The first sentences describe the general matter. After those they get into more details with average importance. The last sentences are even more detailed but less important.
    • Following this principle enables typesetters to “bring in” text. That is in typesetter-terms the process of shortening submitted texts if it is needed to fit it into the designated article-space.
    • Compare the Lemma Article on Wikipedia
  • IPR: Generally texts are published without any license hints or author names. It is possible to mention the authors and anything else in the PDF-file metadata. These do not get printed but are viewable with metadata capable PDF-file-viewers.
    • The reclaim education itself has been published under the CC-BY-NC-SA-license so far.
  • There is not yet a consensus on the battle American English versus British English. I personally tend to AE.
  • There exists a Unicode-non-breaking-space. Only use it, if you know what it is and where it should be inserted.

Furthermore there are some restrictions taken care of in the final stage. They are mentioned in the § content. Please at least consider them.

Well-known abbreviations

These abbreviations do not need to be explained. You are encouraged to use them to save the few space we have and accelerate the reading speed. Only use the following writing form.

  • approx. – approximate(ly)
  • ca. – circa – approximately
  • e. g. – exempli gratia – for example, for instance
  • esp. – especially
  • etc. – et cetera – and so on, and the rest
  • v. v. – vice versa

Feel free to edit this section and add or drop abbreviations.

Following acronyms are optional.

  • GB – the isle Great Britain where the states England, Shotland & Wales are located
  • UK – the nation United Kingdom, “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” includes England, Shotland, Wales & Northern Ireland
  • USA – United States (of) America; the United States of Mexico which are located in America, too, are just named Mexico

Typesetter requirements

  • Everyone should be able to typeset an issue. Thus we need to use libre software. De facto scribus [skraɪˈb.əs] is the only most suitable program for our needs. You need to be able to use scribus.
  • A basic knowledge of fonts, typography and computer typesetting. The links in the following section may give you an idea. You are encouraged to learn by doing. There is no pre existing sustained knowledge needed but desired.
  • You need time: Typesetting a complete issue till its final release takes (accumulated) three to four hours. There are breaks between versions for review.

Workflow.

Current mode of workflow roughly is the following:

  1. Someone suggest to issue a new reclaim.education.
  2. S*he maybe supplies a topic (kick-off GWoA (global week of action), end of GWoA, some national movement [OccupyWallstreet, Bildungsstreik, UniBrennt]).
  3. …
  4. One person at a time typesets a whole issue.
  5. S*he uploads the latest version for review and sends the link to the reclaim.education-ML.
  6. Changes are proposed and implemented till a dead-line.
  7. Dead-line: The issue got published. It gets announced via the ISM (international students movement) global ML.

Typesetting rules

Macro typography

  • We use a layout grid as you will notice in the attached template (see § See also).
  • Typeset against baseline.
  • Strict no orphans or widows.
  • No optical margins alignment on article bodies as long as scribus does not support that on all characters.
  • River-review on finalization phase. At least care about obvious definitive annoying rivers.
  • In general: Embed all fonts.
  • Article body: Paragraphs got the first line indented.
  • Extensive hyphenation
  • Three consecutive hyphens maximum. Scribus takes care of it unless you manually install soft-hyphens. This is pretty weird behaviour as the automatic soft hyphens are done somehow, too.
  • No hyphens across columns nor pages.
  • Superscript and subscript.
    • Ordinal numbers (first, second, third, …) got superscript st, nd, rd and th. The counterpart (zero, one, two, three, …) is called cardinal numbers – just as general knowledge.
  • Balanced image/text arrangement: Do not put all images onto one hand.
  • Either texts (parols) in images are readable or not but not inbetween. The reader should not bother wether he has to be able to read the text or not.

Micro typography

  • No ligatures – no time for that. This needs a typeface with minor conflicts only. As long as scribus does not support automatic substitution of letter combinations.
  • (eventually manual) kerning on V…, T… and quotation marks. Else nowhere as long as scribus does not support kerning tables.
  • ensure right quotations marks (“ and ” in English texts; mnemonic “ is formed like two 6es and ” looks like two 9s – 6 is less than 9)
  • Use the right dashes: - as hyphen, – as “thoughts dash”, — for omitted stuff
  • dashes are surrounded by spaces
  • horizontal ellipsis … instead of three dots

Content

  • In general: Every picture should get its caption.
  • If a pictures contains text written in a foreign language it should get translated.
  • Headings do not contain abbreviations, acronyms or any other shortening. This is a strict rule. Also they do not have a period in the end.
    • Therefore “headings” in a story which are highlighted by a run-in header do have an period if they are an ellipsis (not an actual sentence).
  • Refuse inclusion of LQ pictures.
  • web links are https:// (encrypted) if available
  • web links to foreign language only pages should state so by the link: e. g. ttt.someGermanSite.de (German only)
  • all fonts are included into the PDF-files unless there is a good reason not to do so

Typesetters so far

Prospectus

some ideas

  • formats
    • eye-witness reports
    • interviews (if any chance)
    • opinions (if applicable)
    • a picture only page e. g. after a GWoA (global week of action), with captions
  • feedback
    • a copies counter, how many got where distributed?

See also