• Deadline to submit an article
• Technical guidelines
• Technical guidelines (book reviews)
• Graphical guidelines
• Tips and tricks for writing an article
• Revision
• How to send your article?
• How to complete your Universal Thread profile?

Step 1: Do you have a Universal Thread account?
Step 2: Start writing your article
Step 3: Use TABLE and IMG tags, as defined in the article, if applicable
Step 4: Update your profile to enter your company name, your email, your Web site and your biography as well as your picture.
Step 5: Send us the article, the image(s) of your article and any zip file(s)

Each article should be received by the 10th of each month. An article received by that date is usually focused to appear in the next issue.

• Do not write your article using an HTML editor. The best editor for us, to allow a proper and clean editing, is simply Notepad. <s> The magazine is using its own stylesheet. Thus, the editing required to make it fit into our own format will be faster as oppose to removing all unnecessary tags an HTML editor would include.

• The following classes can be used:

  Tag	Class	Explanation	Demo
  P	ArticleSection	Represents an article section	...Evan Delay and Cindy Winegarden. We also include an interview with Ari Bixhorn about VB.Net. Our first Universal Thread members profile is about Eric Moreau. Eric is mostly involved in the Universal Thread Visual Basic forum since its debut. He'll tell us more about what he is doing, his involvment in the forum and his view at long term. VS Connections Our recent conference was the VS Connections one in Orlando where we were on site to cover the event for the Official Coverage. This has been our most interesting coverages so far. I am proud of all the persons who were involved in the reporting team who contributed...
  PRE	Code	Used to list a program	Here is the program: Do While Not Eof() Skip EndDo
  TABLE	Detail	Display a table	NodeKey ParentKey NodeText root C:\ L001_001 Root C:\Windows

• If you have a portion of code which is long or which represents a program in itselves, have it zipped in a file and establish a link within your article.

• Don't put two spaces for line separators. This is useless in HTML. It also simplifies our editing when only one space is used for line separators.

• Don't force carriage returns in your article when those are not necessary. A paragraph should be written non wrapped so this provides a clear readability when verifying your article.

• When your code includes some HTML code, make sure to replace all < signs with &lt; characters. This will assure your code will be displayed as is. Don't forget, the same applies with your development code if you have some greather signs in it. Avoid including long lines of code. If you have long lines, make sure you wrap them on several lines. Try to not exceed 100 characters. The code will appear with the PRE tag. As the PRE tag is non wrapped, this is why you have to fix the length of your lines.

• When you include some code, indent any indentation with three spaces and not by the use of tabs.

• Each paragraph should be preceeded with a P tag after a blank line. When we verify your article, it is important that we are able to read it. If you write all paragraphs without any blank line as the separation, this is extremely difficult for us to understand its flow.

• There is no need to add a P tag before and after a PRE tag as the PRE tag already includes a paragraph delimiter.

• When in need to add a paragraph, always use the P tag and not <BR><BR>.

Here is the HTML view of what this HTML code would give:

Do While Not Eof()
   Skip
EndDo

• Include at the top of the review the book details. The following example is taking from "The Software Developer's Guide". Note that additional book details may be included. That may vary based on the book.

  Author: Whil Hentzen
  Publisher: Hentzenwerke Corporation
  ISBN: 193091900X
  Paperback: 548 pages
  Dimensions (in inches): 1.14 x 9.10 x 7.02
  3rd edition (July 2002)
  Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/193091900X/qid=1033007807/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_3/104-4551462-5371141?v=glance&n=507846

• Send a picture of the book cover and align it from the top of your article on the upper right.

• If you include more than one review in your article, add a review header, by the use of the ArticleSection class, for the title of the book.

• If you make reference to the book name in your review, add in within quotes.

• Send your graphics in GIF format. Don't send them in JPG format. When this is the case, it doesn't give us any flexibility if we have to edit it. Please, save it in GIF format. Then, assuming we have to change the background color to make it transparent, we will be able to do it.

• Send us only the necessary window. Don't send us the entire screen. By entire screen, we mean the entire desktop of your monitor. It is only necessary to capture the related window as this allows us a better flexibility for the article layout and won't take as much space.

• You may use a tool such as SnagIt for your screen captures. That will give you greater flexibility for capturing the active window.

• If you capture your graphics using a region cut and that you do not apply the proper editing, this will force us to do so and that takes so time. If you do not have a proper tool to use, make sure you edit the cut image before sending it to us. By that, we need to have the graphic to have the window boundaries. When you send the graphics where one or two pixels are including outside of your captured window, this forces us to edit your graphics and may delay the release of your article.

• You may consider resizing your windows to the proper size before capturing it. Unnecessary area in your captured window takes some space for nothing. When doing your screen captures, it is only necessary to cut the proper sizing of the content which appear in your window.

• Save all your graphic files with your first and last name followed by the ordering in which they appear in your article. So, if your name is Michel Fournier and you have 2 graphics to send, they should be named MichelFournier1.gif and MichelFournier2.gif. This should match the URL of the reference in your article.

• Do not send pictures greather than 700 pixels.

Our recommended tool for editing is LViewPro. It allows any type of graphic conversionS, resizing, redimensioning and other necessary features to handle some editing on your graphics. It can be downloaded from http://www.lview.com.

• Try to separate your article within sections. If you have a few paragraphs that deal with the same subject, make use of our P Class=ArticleSection style to add a header for those paragraphs.

• Include an introduction to your article. It is always a good idea to give the readers an idea of what your article will talk about.

• Include a conclusion to your article. You may include a short resume of what you talked about and any related information about any upcoming article, if you plan to add more topics to the existing one, etc.

• If your article is a follow up on a previous article, make sure to state it near the top of your article. Resume a little bit what was prior discussed in that article. So, this allows the readers to be up to date. Remember, not all readers may have read your prior article.

• Include pictures where appropriate. Sometimes, it is really necessary to include a picture to best describe a situation.

When time permits, we may send you an email to revise your article before we release the magazine.

You may send your articles to Michel Fournier.

Send one email stating that this is for the Universal Thread magazine with the related attachments. The article should be in a TXT file format with the related files, when applicable.

Your article should be named with your name such as MichelFournier.TXT. Your picture should be named as per your Universal Thread account ID such as 000001.jpg. The graphic files should be named MichelFournier1.gif, MichelFournier2.gif, etc. The zip files should be named MichelFournier1.zip, MichelFournier2.zip, etc. The TXT file that you may make reference to, assuming a small piece of code that you wouldn't want to zip in a file could be saved as MichelFournier1.TXT, MichelFournier2.TXT, etc.

If you already wrote for the magazine and/or if you Universal Thread account profile already includes a big picture, there is no need to send us your picture.

• In the "Update your account" section, under "Identification", make sure your information is up to date
• In the "Update your account" section, under "Biography", make sure the English version is entered
• In the "Your picture online" section, make sure your pictures are uploaded

Copyright © 2008, Level Extreme Inc., All Rights Reserved
62 rue Doucet, Petit-Rocher, New Brunswick, E8J 1L3
Telephone: 506-783-9007 Email: mfournier@levelextreme.com