This is work in progress and is meant as a help for my commercial clients in explaining how to supply material for use by others, particularly designers.
Supplying material.
Supplying material to use in your publication, be it web site or a printed item, seems at first straight forward but is often where extra costs are incurred through a lack of understanding of what's needed. The truth is to supply both text and pictures successfully you need to have a grasp of the technical issues involved as well as a fair understanding of file formats, both word processing and pictures.
Text.
The Words
The golden rule is you are supplying data not fancy looking designs, any attempt to make the text look like the final job or "attractive" is a waste of your time and will mean extra effort on the part of the person receiving it, as the first thing that will be required is to remove all visual formatting.
Document structure.
In a perfect world text produced in a word processing program would be typed in plainly only using the "Styles" functions to produce document structure - and this is the important point, document structure, titles, headings, paragraphs, all are part of the structure of the document; the way the document is partitioned into smaller bits to make it both easier to read and understand.
Spending time on understanding this structure will help produce better text that is both easier to create and read. Spending time making the text "visually pretty" is most often a sign that little thought is going into what is being written and as a result will be a chore to read.
File formats.
Remember there are many word processors - do not assume that "Microsoft Word" and "Word Processors" are the same thing, they are not. They often save in different file formats, this means, for instance, that a documents saved by OpenOffice Write can not be opened by MS Word. It gets even worse, different versions of the same program sometime save different file formats that older versions cannot open. It is important to find out what formats the recipient of your material can handle before sending anything, both what programs and what versions.
Most word processors can save in different file formats, often only loosing only esoteric visual formatting, so obstacles can often be overcome if the end users needs are first ascertained.
Pictures.
Size and resolution.
Pictures in a computer are made up of a grid of little square dots called "pixels" each defining colour and brightness. The size of a picture in the computer is measured in the number of pixels height and length. As a single pixel has no defined length or height there is NO relationship to the physical world outside the computer where centimetres and inches rule. For web pages this is fine as the unit of measurement of a display screen is pixels so there is a relationship and pixels are the preferred unit of measurement when web sites are being designed.
For physical print it is different. A relationship needs to be created and this is "pixels per inch" (or as it's more commonly referred to in the print world; DPI - dots per inch). So, for example, if a picture is needed to be printed 5 inches wide it would need to be 1500 pixels wide to get the optimum quality (the rule of thumb being top quality needs at least 300dpi). This would be a huge picture if used in a web page where the width is often around 400~500 pixels in width and most computer screens are 1280 pixels or less wide . A picture with less pixels could be used but the image will get progressively "softer" as the number of pixels reduce. The average web site picture 400 pixels wide would just print over the inch at top quality.
So, to supply pictures to a designer you must have a way to find out the size in pixels and to have an idea what the final size will be. Sending pictures that are much bigger than needed is usually the way to go as this allows flexibility by the designer as well as quality in the final product.
Colour spaces
There are different ways of describing colour in pictures stored electronically. The most common is by defining the colour by using combinations of red green and blue, this is described as a colour space and is named an RGB colour space. In the print world colours in pictures are often defined by the colours cyan, magenta, yellow and black shortened to CMYK (K is black). It goes further, the red green and blue each can be slightly different! Needless to say exact matching between the various methods of displaying colour, LCD screens, CRT screens, paper of types too numerous to imagine, plastics, offset printing inks, inkjet inks, etc. is impossible and close matching is expensive. Expecting your masterpiece looking the same in print as it does on your screen or printed from your laser is a non-starter.
File formats.
Just like text files there are many picture file formats. The most common being JPEGs TIFFS and BMP files. These days the file format most people are familiar with is JPEG, widely used in digital cameras.
JPEGs main advantage is that the picture data is compressed to make the saved file take up less storage space. One of the side effects of this is that some of the detail in the picture is "thrown away". The greater the compression to make a smaller file the more detail is discarded. JPEG allows different levels of compression from very light where the file is not much reduced in size and little detail is lost, to very heavy where the file is much smaller but the picture is very degraded. For best results JPEGs sent to designers should have very little compression. Making the a small file size "to make them easy to e-mail" says straight away to the designer that you're not much concerned with quality - not perhaps a message one really wants.