Desktop Publishing
An interesting consequence of word processing systems is that professional-quality documents (books, newsletters, posters, etc.) which used to require a professional publisher can now be done in small shops.
Question for discussion - what do book and newspapers publishers do that cannot be replicated or replaced by individuals? Why do they exist?
Producing professional-quality publications (instead of papers) requires desktop-publishing software such as Aldus Pagemaker, instead of a word processing system like Microsoft Word.
Such systems are typically integrated with libraries of images (clip art) which can be copied freely into documents.
Question for discussion - what are the copyright and ethical issues created by the ease with which it is possible to cut up, reuse, and redistribute text obtained via the WWW?
Page Descriptions
To help people create documents, many word processing systems (including Word) are WYSIWYG - ``what you see is what you get''. This makes it easier to create documents that look right when you print them.
Inside the word processor, how are these files stored? They are represented as blocks of text with formatting information, which Microsoft Word can interpret to decide to how to draw it on the screen.
For example: [paragraph I [italics want] my MTV!]
Such text markup languages enable one to specify exactly how a document should be formatted, without typing it in through a word processor.
The standard way to create WWW pages is not WYSIWYG, but where you use a language (HTML) to describe what the document should look like. This provides more flexibility - for example, applications programs can output files with formatting commands to look different in different circumstances.
My WWW notes are the result of a program which translates the text from my work processor (latex) into HTML.
Printer page description
How are printers told exactly what they should print? The word processor must describe the page precisely. There are two options:
Postscript
The most popular page description language is Postscript. Any Postscript printer must have its own processor built in to understand the language - it is a computer itself!
Most laser printers today use Postscript. Thus they can print any document produced by any word processor which uses postscript.
Older printers use the computer itself to drive the printer. Thus the word processor must know exactly which printer it is writing to. You must make sure your printer is supported by your word processor, or else nothing will work!
Graphics Software
Presentation graphics software is designed to create slides for talks. Slides integrate text and graphics differently from conventional papers.
Color is not a problem for photographic slides the way it is for paper documents.
Generating graphics (like charts and graphs) from data is typically done within spreadsheet programs, which can be used to analyze numbers.
For this reason, Microsoft Office integrates Excel (spreadsheet), Word (wordprocessor), Access (database) with its presentation graphics software (Powerpoint).
When using graphics, make sure that flourishes are for a point, not just to look exciting - See Tufte's "Visualization of Quantitative Data"