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• We recommend to edit your articles with a plain text editor. A WYSIWYG HTML editor may also do the job but produces usually "ugly" HTML files with lot of   and non standard tag attributes in it. If you have never written HTML pages then it is a good opportunity to learn it now. Take a look at the simple HTML guide. Some basic HTML tags are sufficient to write the article.
  
  
• No matter how you edit your article your should use our template (new001.meta.shtml). This is a simple HTML file with some structure in it. After the heading ArticleBody you can just write your article as you like. Save this template to disk and edit it.
  
  
• If the subject of the article favors it, we encourage the inclusion of illustrations and figures in the body of the article. Authors are free to use diagrams to illustrate ideas, organize concepts or to motivate readers.
  
  
• Every article in our magazine brings a picture of the author and a small personal biography. The biography can be a few paragraphs long and its goal its to give authors a chance to talk about their history, professional background, hobbies, relation to Linux, etc. This information should be included in the template after the heading AboutTheAuthor. The picture of the author goes after AuthorImage.
  
  
• Before writing a new article think a bit about the structure of your article and the message that you would like to send to the reader. The best articles are understandable for new Linux users and and still interesting to people with experience.
  
  
• An article is a window to a given field of knowledge. Do not leave that door closed. Include references at the end of the article, both to Web publications (URLs) and to printed sources.
  
  
• Experience shows that most readers prefer article which can be read in less than 20 minutes. If you have a much longer article then consider splitting it into 2 articles (e.g article1: introduction, installation small example, article2: more advanced features and examples). As a guideline: 1500 to 3500 words. Not more. You can use the UNIX command wc -w to count the words.
  
  
• Articles can be submitted to the editor of your own language or directly to the editor-in-chief (currently this is Guido Socher ). The lf-team page has a list of contact persons with e-mail addresses. Preferably your article and the included images, code examples etc... should be packed together in a tar.gz archive. The command to do this under Linux is:
  tar zcvf myart.tar.gz file1 file1 file3...
  
  
• You must own the full copyright for your article. That is: it is original and must not be the work of somebody else. If you publish information about projects or software or anything that does not have an open copyright license then you must have the permission to do so. Example: you must not write about a new software developed in a secret project at the CIA unless you have written permission to do so.
  
  
• All our articles are published under the terms of the Gnu Free Documentation License (see copy right page). By sending in an article to LinuxFocus for publication you certify that you agree to these terms.
  
  

Happy editing and thanks for you time and creativity! We look forward to receive your article.