TCMOS – Illustrations and Tables – Chapter 3

Sunday, February 2, 2020
Blog #13 – learnings from #TheChicagoManualOfStyle.

Illustrations

Definitions:

Illustrations are images presented separately from the story, which are typically halftone: broken into equally spaced pixels or continuous-tone: paintings, photographs, etc.

A line art is a drawing made of solid black on white background.

A plate is a full-page of illustrations, typically printed on a separate, coated paper that can be collated into several such pages called galleries. One such gallery exists in the autobiography of Queen Noor of her memorabilia in the middle of the book. Note, galleries consist of four, eight, twelve or “a number divisible by four” pages, always beginning on a recto.

Illustrations will be numbered (unless in a gallery) for ease of reference and should appear as close to the reference as possible.

All artwork is submitted to the publisher in a separate file.

Captions don’t include punctuation like a period if they’re incomplete sentence. But full sentences will take a closing punctuation.

For titles, a little refresher from chapter 9:

• Most titles are headline style (first letter capital of each word)
• Titles of paintings, drawings, photographs, statues, and books are in italics
• Rest of titles in Roman and in quotation marks

Other formatting considerations:

1. A comma separates the figure number and caption
2. Words top, bottom, left, right, above, left to right, clockwise from left, or inset used to identify elements inside illustrations are in italics
3. Credit line follows the caption and includes author, title, publication details, and copyright date, etc. For “made for hire” illustrations created by your staff, it’s courtesy to give credit even if not required by rules.

Charts

A chart is a line art and should be numbered and labeled as a figure consistently. Both axes are labeled. Their titles are capitalized sentence style, only first letter is capital. Other elements such as labels are lowercase.

Tables

We rely on Microsoft Word and Excel for table formats, but before you publish a book containing these, it’s nice to learn the rules followed by the tools.

A table contains complex data along rows and columns, and should be numbered separately from illustrations (table 1, table 2, etc.). Note lowercase table.

Follow the following guidelines for tables:

1. Make titles succinct and in noun form
2. They are written in sentence style (only first letter capital of sentence) or headline style (first letter of all words with exceptions). Be consistent.
3. Column heads are capitalized sentence style
4. Sub entries (with subheads and spanner heads) and runover lines are indented … so, when multiples lines are used for cell values, subsequent lines will be indented.
5. Remove ambiguity of which cell maps to which rows using leaders, a series of spaced periods, to connect the two
6. Empty cells: If a cell is empty, decide whether to leave blank or use em dash or three unspaced ellipsis dots. To distinguish between “not applicable” and “not available,” use a blank cell for the former and an em dash or an ellipsis for the latter.
7. Alignments
   1. If multiple lines exist in a row, align content to the last line of the row (longest). Numbers are aligned with the last digit (right) or to the decimal (line up the decimals).
   2. For tables with only words (no numbers), left-right align although can be centered when no runover lines exist.
8. Notes to tables appear at bottom. Use symbols or letters for references to notes as specified in TCMOS.

Editing Tables

1. Percent is not the same as percentage–one is adverb, other is adjective.
2. Don’t overlap number ranges.
3. The measurement units are set in the column head and data in cells
4. Sometimes tables are skinny–remedy by breaking in half and displaying content side by side by fattening a table to fit the page.
5. Sometimes tables are fat (runover). Remedy by putting numbers in columns heads or abbreviations or extending to the margins.
6. When tables overrun a page, column heads are repeated unless facing the same side.

My Takeaway

I reminded myself this may be helpful for my day job one day because in the fiction world my protagonist would have to possess scientific expertise to really force a table in. Nonetheless, my pride lies in my ability to complete the task. So signing off with a smile.

Four chapters remain. Next, it’s math time.

Source: The Chicago Manual of Style, SEVENTEEN EDITION.

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