A discussion of the principles that should govern the choice of illustrations for a book or document and the technical processes by which photographs, drawings, and other types of artwork are reproduced lies beyond the scope of this text-oriented book. A few general pointers can, nonetheless, be given.It is important to consult carefully with the person or organization that will be printing your work to ensure that you present your graphic material in a form suitable for reproduction and that the results will genuinely enhance your work. Modern color printers attached to home computers suggest that color printing has become easy, and the fact that newspapers frequently feature color photographs suggests that mass-producing colored artwork has become relatively cheap. Nevertheless, for the person who, for instance, intends to self-publish a book, color reproduction is still an expensive item. Any color printing is more expensive than black and white, and multicolor printing is most expensive of all.If the main disadvantage of color printing is the cost, the main drawback with the printing of some black-and-white items is lack of clarity. Maps or diagrams with different kinds of shading or in which small-sized text is incorporated into the graphic material are particularly prone to indifferent legibility. So, if you are thinking of including an illustration of that type, you should take care that it can be reproduced with sufficient sharpness and is of sufficiently large size to convey its message clearly.Like tables, illustrations—unless they are collected together in a separate section of the book—should be positioned as close as possible to the correlating passages of text, which also may contain a reference to them. Also, they should follow those passages, not precede them. When there are a large number of illustrations, the illustrations should be numbered (figure 1, figure 2) consecutively, either throughout the book or chapter by chapter. In the latter case, you might use a double numbering system: Figure 9.2, for example, would refer to the second illustration in chapter 9.Again, when there are a large number of illustrations, a list of them should be provided at the beginning of the book or document after the table of contents:Illustrations | 1. View of the Houses of Parliament from the "London Eye" | 21 | | 2. Interior of the House of Commons | 28 |
The figures are identified by their captions, if the captions are fairly short. If a caption is lengthy, it should be suitably shortened for the list.When you submit a manuscript to a publisher or pass it to a printer, the artwork is kept separate from the text, nowadays usually on a separate computer file. It is quite easy for mistakes to occur when the illustrations are married to the text. It is very important, when you proofread your own work, to check that the illustrations appear in the correct order, are correctly positioned in relation to the text, and have the correct captions.Captions and Credit LinesNearly every illustration, graph, and diagram needs a good clear caption. If an image is to be worth the traditional "thousand words," the reader must know what he or she is looking at.A caption is, in effect, the title of the illustration. It should be kept factual and short:Fig. 2. The kitchen in the victim's apartment It is, however, perfectly legitimate to add additional material that may point to an item of particular interest in the illustration or explain some aspect of it. The Chicago Manual of Style distinguishes between the caption and any additional material and refers to the latter as the "legend." The legend follows the caption after a period:Fig. 2. The kitchen in the victim's apartment. The police officer is pointing to the exact spot where the victim's body was found. Like quoted words, visual material that is taken from another source must be provided with an acknowledgment. The acknowledgment is given in a "credit line." Written permission is often required to reproduce an image, graph, table, and the like, made by another person, so the credit line frequently takes the following form:Reprinted, by permission, from [author's name and title of work] If you ask somebody to prepare a map, photograph, etc., for inclusion in your text, you should likewise credit that person:Map/photograph/drawing by [artist's name]
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