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THL Word To XML Manual

Contributor(s): David Germano, Than Grove, Steve Weinberger.

This manual covers the preparation of essays offline to be published by THL's XML Essay Publication system. This system is not online and is time-consuming. However, the end result is the most flexible and powerful online presentation. A central part of it is the use of Microsoft Word for initial preparation of essays. The JIATS journal is published using THL's XML Publishing system.

Preparing an Essay in Microsoft Word

Please read through all the pages linked to in this section before you begin processing your essay.

To prepare your essay using Microsoft Word, we require that you:

1. Provide a standard abstract, bibliography, and brief biographical statement, as well as a signed and dated Author Agreement.
2. Use a Unicode font and follow THL standards for transliteration & transcription of non-English terms
3. Use The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, to standardize your use of punctuation and formatting of your article/essay as well as formatting of bibliographical items in the humanities style. Use the print version of The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, the online version, or best of all, THL’s condensed version of the essential points for formatting & bibliographic citations)
4. Paste your essay into our Microsoft Word Template and fill out the short metadata table at the top.
5. Download the Microsoft Word Glossary Table template
6. Prepare your essay and create a Glossary of Terms by following our instructions for preparing an essay and glossary table

If you have special materials like tables, images, maps, or videos, we have special guidelines for how to prepare and submit such materials (see Photos, Graphs, Charts, Video, and Other Media).

We can also provide authors with PDFs if they want to print them out and refer to printed text instead. Please contact us if you do not have PDFs of these instructions and want them.

Optional Resources for the Adventurous & Truly Helpful

Please note that preparing these essays for digital publication is very time intensive. There are very simple additional things that scholars can do to greatly simplify staff work if they are willing to learn some minimal aspects of using “styles” in Microsoft Word, but we do not require them.

For willing scholars, the following are honestly simply instructions to using “styles” in Microsoft Word which will save large amounts of staff time and make the process of publication far faster:

1. Checklist
2. Pasting Your Essay into the Template
3. Applying the First Word Styles
4. The Cataloging Record for Your Essay
5. How to Handle Non-English Passages or Entire Texts
6. Structure of the Word Document: Front, Body, and Back Sections
7. Applying Word Styles to Select Words in the Body of the Essay

The following are optional background reference resources on preparing essays according to THL/JIATS styles in Word:

• Using Microsoft Word Styles: this is a general introduction to using “styles” in Microsoft Word.
• Using Word Styles for THL Markup: these are the specific instructions for using THL’s Word styles for preparing essays for THL publication.

For Technologists only:

• THL Staff Documentation for XML Essays
• Creating an XML Essay for THL
• JIATS Pre-Conversion Markup Procedures
• The Converter

Provided for unrestricted use by the Tibetan and Himalayan Library