Author's Notes

Please deliver your manuscripts as plain text files (.txt) or office formats (Word or Libreoffice) unformatted and as continuous text without breaks. Since the texts on web pages are delivered in HTML format, formatting such as from Word incl. breaks cannot be included. Please do not submit PDF files, as texts from PDFs can only be transferred with difficulty. Please create text files without embedded images - these should be delivered separately.

All texts should be neither too short nor too long. The following are guidelines for professional articles:

• Headline: max. 30-40 characters
• Preliminary text (teaser): max. 250 characters
• Main text: min. 3000, max. 5000 characters. In exceptional cases, longer if spread over several pages.

The following limits apply to texts on our news page:

• Headline: max. 30 characters
• Preliminary text (teaser) max. 250 characters
• Message text: max. 1500 characters

Your manuscripts should contain the following formal elements:

• A meaningful headline, which should not be too long and preferably search engine optimized (e.g., contain important keywords).
• A short introduction, which summarizes or introduces the following main text and arouses interest in reading the entire text.
• A main text divided into text blocks with subheadings (except news reports, here please always two text blocks without subheading)
• Name and, if applicable, position/company of the author
• Captions (BU) that briefly and concisely explain the included images and illustrations, with copyright notice if applicable

Please send us your image material as a web-capable graphic file, i.e. mainly

• JPG
• GIF
• PNG
• SVG

Ideal for pixel images is the JPG format, for graphics also GIF. SVG files for vector-based illustrations are also possible.

If possible, please do not send uncompressed formats such as RAW or proprietary file types such as PSD, as these are firstly too large and secondly cannot be displayed by a browser.

Since we publish exclusively on the web, we do not require a high print resolution, but web-optimized images and graphics that do not take too long to load. A resolution of 72 pixels per inch (ppi) is usually perfectly sufficient.

For our website we mainly use wide format images and graphics. If portrait format is available, image cropping may be required.

Surface-Online has a responsive web design, so the page adapts to the screen of the end device. When uploaded to our system, each image is automatically scaled and saved in multiple sizes to be available for any screen size.

The lead images at the top of each web page are 800 x 300 pixels in the largest screen width for PC monitors, the others are usually 800 pixels wide with a height of 300 - 450 pixels, typically in 16:9 format. An optimal image is in wide format and with the specified values.

• Please do not insert your images directly into your manuscripts (embedded), but as separate files in an extra folder. In the text itself there should only be a note with caption and filename
• Please also do not include PDF files with embedded images. These can not be extracted easily
• Instead of sending the image files by mail, you can also send them by upload link. This is especially recommended for many image files that exceed the maximum size of email attachments. If necessary, we can also set up upload access for you on our corporate cloud.

• Abbreviations such as "e.g." or "i.d.R." should normally be written out in full. If abbreviations customary in the industry are used, they should be written out once the first time they are mentioned in the text
• Please number references consecutively and document them at the end of the text.
• We use the current official spelling. Please do not use proper spellings or capital letters, for example in product or company names ("Meinefirma" instead of "MeineFirma" or "MEINEFirma"). Please avoid copyright notices for brand names such as "TM" or "®" at all costs! The same applies to so-called gender language - here, too, we adhere to the official dictionary and spelling
• Please avoid "marketing speak" including superlatives. Readers expect factual information, not advertising copy. A technical article should not sell, but inform. Marketing-heavy texts reduce the willingness of readers to read the texts to the end
• Constant repetition of company and product names is counterproductive. For readers, this has a strongly marketing-heavy effect, and search engines also rank texts with too many repetitions of certain words lower. Better than repeating "Company XY" every time is to replace it with variants such as "the company"
• Start your post with general information about your project, technology or product. The introduction is particularly suitable for briefly summarizing the content of your publication and, together with a cleverly chosen headline, for arousing curiosity about the text. Companies, persons or product names involved may of course be mentioned, but should rather be placed further down in the text
• Details such as a short summary of a technology or formulas are best placed in an info box.
• Special characters, e.g. in formulas, the subscript and superscript of characters or tables can sometimes not be displayed correctly on web pages. This is especially true when importing from other formats such as Word into HTML, since other formatting is used here. You are welcome to create a graphic, for example of formulas or tables, which we can include instead
• Please avoid direct forms of address such as "you" - in technical articles - in contrast to an advertising brochure, for example - the reader is not addressed directly, but indirectly. Example: Instead of "visit us at our booth to see our novelties" -> "Visitors can see the novelties at the booth of XY"

• For all publications, please do not forget the name(s) of the author(s). We are also happy to mention the names of the companies involved at the end of the text and link to their websites
• We can include multimedia elements such as PDFs or videos in connection with the article if required, also as a text box
• Please clarify whether you own all copyrights to the publication, including the image material. By publishing your article, you transfer to us the right to distribute your text and images on our portal. As is usual with online publications, our articles are usually also available for an unlimited period of time and, if necessary, also in other languages
• Updates or corrections are of course possible even after publication, as we publish exclusively on the Internet
• We offer our texts bilingual in German and English. You do not have to provide us with a translation, we use a system-integrated automatic machine translation of very high quality