Issue Number 27 - June 2000

This is a classic writer's guide which I decided to add to my shopping basket during a recent bout of retail therapy over at Amazon.co.uk. It was originally the house style guide for compositors at the Oxford University Press, and it has gone on to become a standard reference guide to typographical niceties and layout. Hart's gives rulings on everything from difficult spellings, foreign terms, and the correct presentation of numbers, tables, and illustrations - to the typography of foreign languages. It's an amazingly compact reference - and yet it covers just about everything. Small wonder it's in its thirty-ninth edition!

http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/oxf-har.htm

Advice to would-be writers
Lots of people write stories, articles, even books - but then have difficulty getting them published. This is often caused by an [understandable] ignorance of how commercial publishing works. Wouldn't it be useful to have advice from an insider in the business? Betsy Lerner is that person - an experienced editor with years in top class publishing houses. She has written a guidance manual which reviewer Jane Dorner describes as a 'must-read' for all writers, editors, and even publishers.

http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/lerner.htm

Dictionary review - a winner!
Last issue we announced that we would give a FREE copy of the Oxford Writer's Dictionary to anyone who wrote a review of their favourite dictionary. We had a winner within 24 hours! She's Alison Trimble from Chester, who produced an excellent account of her Heinemann Dictionary. It's a dictionary compiled for use in schools, and has been designed with the National Curriculum in mind - so it might be of interest to many of our subscribers.

http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/heineman.htm

FREE web site design tutorial
Joe Barta's award-winning free tutorial has been updated and re-designed. It's a terrific collection of easy-step guides in page design. He covers the basics - but also goes on to deal with tables, forms, and frames. Every point is spelled out very clearly, he shows you how to code the pages, and there are lots of screen shots to show you how it *should* look when you've followed his example.

You won't need any special design tools, such as Front Page [the doomed Microsoft program] because he shows you how to write using NotePad - the simplest tool of all. It even includes two really useful features - a font viewer and a colour picker. The font viewer reveals on screen the fonts you have installed on your system, and the colour picker shows you a chart of the famous 'browser-safe' colours, as well as their hexadecimal 'numbers'. It's a 1.5MB download - and worth every moment of the wait.

http://junior.apk.net/~jbarta/

Collins Dictionary-Thesaurus
What a good idea! Two books in one. Mark Roberts, runner-up in our dictionary review competition, writes eloquently on the Collins best-seller which has the dictionary entries in the top half of the page, and synonyms and antonyms in the bottom half. Mark describes this unusual arrangement as 'very attractive to the eye and easy to read' - so much so his copy has fallen apart with use. We've sent him a reference guide to the Net as prize.

http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/collins2.htm

Stopping Junk Mail
Newsletter reader Sean Quinn from Belfast sends us this useful tip for stopping all that rubbish which comes in via snail mail. A lot is written in the computer press about ways of stopping spam and junk e-mail. It may interest some people that there is a way of cutting down on real junk mail too (the stuff the Postman brings). You can register with the Mailing Preference Service, FREEPOST 22, London W1E 7EZ and they will keep you on their database for 5 years as a person who does not wish to receive unsolicited mailings. The service is sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association, the Mail Order Traders Association, The Mail User's Association and Royal Mail. It has worked for me!

Books and their enemies
In 1881, Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' was threatened by the Boston district attorney unless it was expurgated. The furore stimulated enough sales to enable Whitman to buy his Camden home! Proof, if we still need it, that censorship works!

AltaVista Translation Service
Search Engine AltaVista has updated its translation service. Now known as Babel Fish 2000, the site has added several features. You enter the text you want translated by copying-and-pasting into a box on the main page. The box can accommodate about 800 words. Alternatively, you use a URL box and transform an entire web page.

It translates English, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese into each other. There's also an international keyboard which allows users to write in six non-English character sets. Don't expect miracles - except the speed at which it works! - but if you don't speak a particular language and you just need the rough gist of a page or a piece of text, it's worth a look.

http://babelfish.altavista.com