Society for Endocrinology/BioScientifica
artwork guidelines

General information
Summary of recommended file formats
Producing artwork in PowerPoint
Portable document format (PDF) files

General information

Once a manuscript has been accepted we require high resolution figures for printing. We ask that authors submit figures conforming to the following guidelines.

Line drawings (e.g graphs) and illustrations that contain text should be submitted as EPS, or high resolution PDFs. You can find details of how to create high resolution PDFs below

All illustrations in whichever format should conform to the following resolutions: line drawings should be produced at roughly 1000 dpi, colour and greyscale/monotone images should be 300dpi at the size they are to be reproduced.

Summary of recommended file formats

Resolution Formats
Line diagrams/graphsEPS, TIFF, High-Resolution PDF
Colour pictures and monotone/greyscaleTIFF, High-Resolution PDF, JPEG*
Pictures (colour/mono) containing text or overlaid linesTIFF, High-Resolution PDF, JPEG

*JPEG is a compressed file format. If you wish to supply colour or halftone pictures in this format they should really be 600dpi when produced to allow for this.

As well as the above formats we would suggest that authors also send in the original files from the programs in which they were created (e.g. Illustrator, Unigraph etc).

Producing artwork in PowerPoint

Introduction

Microsoft PowerPoint is a software application designed to produce computer screen presentations. Due to the demand by authors for the acceptance of PowerPoint files for figure submission we have developed some guidelines for best practice when using this software.

General

The slide should contain only the information that needs to be printed. Do not include the background or lecture notes on the slide. Do not include the name of the file, such as, "Figure 1", or figure legends within the graphic itself.

All figures should be sized to fit (usually one to two columns wide). This means that we will not have to change the size of figures to fit in the journal. Changing figure sizes to fit may cause type and lines to become too small to read.

Imported artwork

  • Artwork imported into the slide should be 300 dpi for Color and Grayscale and 600 dpi for line art, graphs, etc.
  • Artwork should not be resized within PowerPoint. However, if you are importing a vector EPS file, resolution is not an issue but do not use fonts (letters) in imported EPS graphics.
  • Use ONLY TIFF or EPS formats.
    • object, click on the ±Create from file± tab (or ±from file± button in the Macintosh). While choosing the object ensure that the Link to File box is unchecked.

Fonts

  • Use only TrueType fonts which can be embedded in the presentation file.
  • To tell if your font will be embedded, click Font on the Format menu. If the letters "TT" appear next to the font name, then the font is a TrueType font and, unless it is restricted in use, it will embed correctly.
  • Do not use Unicode or Double-Byte fonts as these do not embed. Unicode or Double-Byte fonts commonly found on Windows systems include Arial Unicode, MS Batang, SimSun, MS Mincho and PmingLiu.
  • For the Macintosh font embedding is not an option in PowerPoint. Use only the following fonts when formatting type in PowerPoint: Arial, Courier New, Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Symbol.

Colour accuracy

PowerPoint files are intended for screen display (RGB colour model) and must be colour separated for creation of printing plates. This process involves transforming RGB color (monitor display) to CMYK colour (commercial printing). It may not be possible to reproduce colours that are represented in a PowerPoint Presentation on press. Please do not rely on a monitor display to predict colour output on press.

Portable document format (PDF) files

PDF files have become common place, having the advantages of being compatible with all computer systems, a free reader, a relatively small file size and being high quality, stable and secure. They can, however, be produced as low resolution (suitable for reading on screen and printing on an office printer) or high resolution (suitable for an imagesetter and printing press).

Producing low resolution PDFs for refereeing

In order to do this you will need a computer programme that is capable of writing PDFs. The most commonly used of these are Acrobat PDFwriter and Acrobat Distiller. However, if neither of these are available you could use one of the alternatives that is available free, for example, PrimoPDF (see www.primopdf.com).

Producing high resolution PDFs for printing

The PDFs that are used for refereeing are less than 1MB in size. This restriction is necessary to take account of the capacities of the various computer systems used by editors, reviewers etc. In order to produce high-resolution artworks that can be used for printing, please follow the guidelines below.

Figures should be produced at 1000dpi for black and white line diagrams, and colour/greyscale images should be produced at least 300dpi.

The PDF should be produced with all images not downsampled and compressed only by ±Zip± or ±CCITT Group 4± methods with all fonts embedded. An appropriate settings file can be found here for Acrobat Distiller version 5 and previous versions and here for Acrobat Distiller version 6. These settings files should be downloaded and imported into Acrobat Distiller by opening Distiller (click on the ±Acrodist± icon in the Distiller folder which is in the Adobe Acrobat folder), open the settings menu and select ±Add Adobe PDF Settings±± from the menu.

If in doubt about how to use these settings then please use the Press Quality Acrobat Distiller setting (or ±Press± for Distiller 5 and below). These settings can be found in the ±Properties± menu of the applications print menu.

If you have any queries please feel free to contact the editorial office.