• Please download the file above. It will include 02joel.doc, 03amos.doc, Formatting Guidlines for Submissions.doc, and bsf.dot.
• Download the Word document (the link to the doc file is located at the bottom of the study).
• Read the  guidelines below and follow the instructions, especially under the First Things First heading. Try to follow our paragraph styles as you write your materials, or convert your current materials to our scheme of paragraph styles.
  This means that you assign Heading 1 or Heading 2 or Body Text or Quote paragraph styles like we do in the sample 02joel.doc or 03amos.coc.
• Email us the article for submission and we will insert it into our submission procedure. We'll handle converting it to HTML. Please remember that we receive hundreds of requests per year and cannot include all of them on our site.
• If you have questions, email us.

Introduction

At bible.org we have a fairly efficient method of converting documents to the web so that they have a consistent look. We do this by making sure that our source documents are formatted with a standard set of paragraph styles. That way, we can open up a document in our conversion program and just click a button and it does most of the work for us.

For those of you who want to submit articles for the website, it would be very helpful if you could submit documents that follow our styles. Even if you don't use our style names, if you have your own styles and follow the guidelines below, we can always run a search and replace macro on your styles and convert them to our style names and then run them through the conversion process.

File-Naming Convention

When multiple documents that make up a series are submitted, it is important that they are sorted in the directory correctly. The easiest way to handle this is to put numbers at the beginning of the file name. For example, theological journals are typically printed two or four times a year. And they typically have a volume and number system of numbering. So, we might name the files VOL01a01.doc, VOL01a02.doc, etc. Or if you had a series of articles on John, you could name them john01.doc, john02.doc, john03.doc, etc. If you have more than 9 documents, be sure to put a "0" (zero) in front of the 1. That way if a book has 11 or 12 articles, they will be sorted correctly.

"Topic" and Target"

Please select a "Topic" category and a "Target Audience" category for your submission. For a list of Topic (or Topics), go to /topics. Identify the topic or topics from the list that apply to your submitted material.

Identify your "Target Audience" (or Audiences) on a scale from 1 to 5: #1 = Non-believer, #2 = New Christian (milk), #3 = Growing Christian (meat), #4 = Mature believer (challenging the thought leaders), and #5 = scholar. This will be used in the future on knowing how to rate or position your submitted material for a proper level of user understanding and comprehension.

Formatting Documents

First Things First

Download and unzip the above word documents. All the referenced documents below are contained in that download.

You will need to make sure that your article has all of our styles in it first. Copy the bsf.dot document template into your template directory. To find your template directory when you have Word open,

1. Go to Tools.Options and click on File Locations tab and under User Templates you will find the location for your document templates. You might have to highlight it and click modify to see the full path.

2. Copy bsf.dot into that folder.

3. When you next start Word, you can go to File.New and base the new file on the BSF Template.

4. Then go to Insert.File and put your article into that document.

5. You will now have all the styles associated with our document template.

Things You Should Never Do

I hate to start with the negatives, but my hope is that after reading the list, you will say to yourself, "I do that. Why shouldn't I?" And you will want to read more to find out why.

• Never hit the Tab key. Tabs don't convert to the web. So, don't put them before the first line of a paragraph, after numbers, to make columns, etc. (I've often threatened to glue an upside down tack on some peoples' tab keys to help them remember.)
• Never just click the list bullet or list number buttons on the tool bar.
• Never click the center button or right align button on the tool bar.
• Never manually change a paragraph to look different, except for use of bold and italics.
• Never use columns.

All of the above formatting issues can be accomplished more effectively with the use of paragraph styles.

Use Paragraph Styles

There are several reasons for using paragraph styles:

Provide Consistent Appearance

If you don't use paragraph styles, you will have to remember that you were using 14 point, bold, Palatino for all your second level headings. You will have to manually change every quote to a certain font size, paragraph margin, leading paragraph space, etc. Chances are good that you will forget to change some of them, or change them to something different. If you use paragraph styles to format a document, then everything in the document will have a consistent appearance.

Global Modification of a Document

If you compose a whole document, and then at a later date, decide you want to change the look of your quotes, headings, bullet lists, or whatever, using paragraph styles will enable you to modify the whole document by just changing the characteristics of one or two styles.

A little known feature of Word is that if you define all your paragraph styles to be based on a style other than Normal, you can actually change the "base" style and all the others will change too. For example, if I define Body Block to be Times, 12 point and base all my other styles (bullet lists, quotes, etc.) on Body block, and then later change Body Block to 10 point or Arial, every style based on Body Block in my document will change to 10 point or Arial.

Enables Other Advanced Features of Word

Outlining/Table of Contents

Any document that has "Heading 1," "Heading 2," etc. assigned, can easily have a table of contents generated with the correct page numbers. And it would be easily updated if we changed the file from 8 1/2 by 11 inches to 6 by 9 inches.

Exporting to PowerPoint

If you compose a document and then later decide to create a PowerPoint presentation from the contents of your Word document, PowerPoint has the ability to import the outline from a Word Document. It will do your work for you.

Facilitates the Conversion Process

If you need to convert a Word document to another format such as HTML, SGML, XML, etc., then a document formatted with paragraph styles will be easy to convert because all conversion programs look for paragraph styles in the conversion process. If you don't use styles, the conversion programs will convert your documents, but they won't look like all the other documents on our site and they will be almost impossible to clean up.

Applying Paragraph Styles

Understand that Microsoft Word automatically assigns the Normal paragraph style to everything. However, you should never use the Normal style. Instead apply styles with meaningful names to everything. But, don't apply styles by how they look. Apply them according to the function of the paragraph. I like to divide styles into three types: structure, function and appearance.

Structure Styles

Word has certain styles that it naturally understands as structural styles. These are your Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. styles.

Structure refers to the logical flow of a document. You present your main point, followed by sub points and perhaps even sub sub-points. If you are writing a proposal, a sermon, a term paper, etc. it must have decent structure. It helps with creating a neat, consistent appearance, generating tables of contents, outlining, reader understanding, and conversion to other electronic forms.

Never assign a Heading X because you like the way it looks. Assign these paragraph styles according to the level the sentence has in the outline. And NEVER assign a Heading style to a whole paragraph. Keep your headings short!

Bad Structure

Hopefully, you would never submit a paper to anyone with the following outline:
(Notice how we skipped from H1 to H3.)

I. Main Point (H1)

1. Sub Sub Point (H3)

2. Sub Sub Point (H3)

3. Sub Sub Point (H3)

A. Sub Point (H2)

1. Sub Sub Point (H3)

2. Sub Sub Point (H3)

B. Sub Point (H2)

(1). Sub Sub Sub Sub Sub point (H5)

(1). Sub Sub Sub Sub Sub point (H5)

(1). Sub Sub Sub Sub Sub point (H5)

II. Main Point

Good Structure

This is the proper way:

I. Main Point

A. Sub Point

1. Sub Sub Point

2. Sub Sub Point

a. Sub Sub Sub Point

b. Sub Sub Sub Point

(1) Sub Sub Sub Sub Point

(2) Sub Sub Sub Sub Point

B. Sub Point

II. Main Point

Notice that we never skip a level. If you were to skip a level, we'd never be able to convert the document to a Logos or Libronix book without a lot of trouble. That may not be a concern to most, but even if all you wanted to do was to automatically generate a table of contents for the document, it would look awful. In fact, generating a TOC or using the document map feature of word (on the View menu) is a great way to check to see if you were consistent in how you assigned your headings.

Function Styles

Most of the other styles should be applied according to their function in the document. Styles like Author, Bibliography, Caption, Editor, List Bullet, List Number, Quote, Scripture, Title, etc. are assigned to paragraphs to identify their function in the document. It should be obvious where to assign those.

Appearance Styles

As much as we'd like, we can't get by with just structural and functional styles. Some stuff still needs to be assigned a style so that it looks a certain way. Below is a list of what we use and explanations of why.

Body Block - paragraphs that are not indented - for example, after a quote where you continue the paragraph that introduced the quote.

Body Text - normal indented paragraphs - this will be used on the majority of paragraphs. Yes this is really a function style, but it needed explanation.

Center - apply this to text you want centered. And apply it to graphics inserted into the document. Don't apply this to a heading! Change the formatting of the Heading style so that all the Heading 1's or whatever are centered if you want them centered.

Poetry - assign to poetry. If you are trying to stagger your text, assign Poetry1 and Poetry2 or something like that.

Right Align - for some short phrase or name that you want on the right side of the doc.

Scripture - if there is a long block quote that is a passage from the Bible, then assign the Scripture style. This will look like a Quote, but it saves us time later when we tag the sgml as numbers in this style are ignored in verse tagging.

Subtitle - use for centered bold stuff that is not part of the structure of the document. Since it is not, you wouldn't assign a heading.

TabA, TabB, etc. - REMEMBER: WE NEVER USE TABS! However, sometimes we need to emulate the appearance of tabs in the text with staggering indents. For example - you might have a literary device called a chiasm that looks like this:

Prodigal Son has a wild party

Prodigal Son is in need

Prodigal Son Repents

Prodigal Son Returns

Prodigal Son receives provisions from father

Prodigal Son attends father's party

Or you might have an outline at the beginning of a section to give an overview of where the reader is going, but it is not part of the main structure of the document. So, you could use the TabA, TabB, etc., styles to preserve the indentations. We used that above in the example of good and bad document structure.

Table, TableC, TableR - First of all - we cannot use columns in a document. We must put parallel text in tables. Assign these styles to the text inside tables. Table is left aligned. TableC is for centered text, TableR is for right aligned text.

Other Formatting details

Small caps and All Caps need to have character styles applied - don't use the format font menus.

Tabs - I repeat - don't use tabs anywhere - they don't translate to sgml. Use paragraph styles and tables.

Foreign Languages

Never use the Insert Symbol dialog box to insert characters. Always use the Alt + whatever character sequence.

Transliteration

For simple transliteration, French or German where upper ascii characters exist - such as the ?, etc. you can stay in Times New Roman and insert the correct upper ascii character. Remember not to do this with the insert symbol command. Use the Alt + number sequence.

Footnotes

Make sure the first paragraph in a footnote is assigned the Footnote Text paragraph style. If you have multiple paragraph footnotes, you can make the successive paragraphs Quote, Center, etc.

Tables

You cannot make fancy tables with colums that span rows. Keep them simple.

Graphics

Never use the Word drawing program. Use some external program and save the graphic as a wmf or gif and insert the file into word.

Conclusion

Those are the basics of formatting. Take a look at the 02joel.doc and 03amos.doc to see how we used styles on those documents.

And feel free to email us if you have questions. Email us