Being a magazine editor isn’t easy. In addition to fretting deadlines and the regular care-and-feeding of authors, editors spend a lot of time and effort reading, re-writing, re-reading, and tweaking articles. Editing is really more of an art than a science — and that’s why editors haven’t been replaced by computers. Yet.
Being a magazine editor isn’t easy. In addition to fretting deadlines and the regular care-and-feeding of authors, editors spend a lot of time and effort reading, re-writing, re-reading, and tweaking articles. Editing is really more of an art than a science — and that’s why editors haven’t been replaced by computers. Yet.
Editors also have to keep track of page counts. After all, each issue of the magazine has a limited number of editorial pages (subtract the number of “ad pages” from the total number of pages to find the number of content or “editorial” pages). Every time an author sits down to write, he or she needs to know how much to write. “How many words?” is a fundamental question. It’s the editor’s job to allocate pages to each article (a column or feature), compute the word count and communicate the word quota to the author. Luckily, that’s a simple math problem, right? Just plug a few numbers into a formula and get the answer.
The trouble is that, until very recently, none of the magazine’s staff really had a good feel for the formula. Everyone had some intuitive feel for computing word counts, but intuition didn’t prove to be very accurate. So, the editors of Linux Magazine recently put their heads together with the art director to come up with something a little more scientific.
Formatting and Layout Elements
The amount of “normal” text (like the text in this paragraph) needed to fill…
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