Desktop publishing DTP applications offer more flexibility in terms of layouts, and are more suitable for working with newsletters, magazines, flyers, posters and other similar documents beyond the reach of the standard word processor. An information technology journalist since , David Nield writes about the Web, technology, hardware and software.
Home Software. Key Purposes The central purpose of a word processor, as the name suggests, is to process words. Other Features More advanced word processors include additional features, such as the ability to insert images into a document. If in doubt, utilize the on-line help to locate the command you want. Any level of text editor or word processor will have commands to save, load, and print your text.
These commands are so frequent that you will usually see many ways to invoke them. There are a number of commands you will find on nearly any word processor that enable you to manipulate text in special ways. Frequently you will find these commands on an Edit menu.
The editing commands are based on a concept called block manipulation. Block manipulation simply means taking a "chunk" of text and marking it in some way so it can be treated as one unit. Once a block of text is marked as such, it can be deleted or manipulated easily. If you have written a document and realize that the last line really belongs at the beginning of the document, you might mark the line you want to move as a block, cut the block move the cursor to the beginning of the document, and activate the paste command.
Another set of commands are found less frequently on text editors, but are common on higher-level word processors. These commands are for formatting various elements of a document.
You may find a format menu. Many of these commands also are available on toolbars. A character is one letter or other symbol. There are many ways to format characters in word processing programs. It is possible to make characters bold, italic, underlined, or perhaps some other attribute. Not all word processors will do all these things, but most will do bold, italic, and underline. Often you activate the command by choosing it from a menu, clicking on a toolbar icon, or activating a key sequence.
Once you have started the command, anything you type will be typed in that style. When you want to go back to standard letters, you activate the same command again. Commands that turn off and on like this are called toggles, because they are reminiscent of toggle switches.
Many word processors allow you to enter the text without any format, then to select a set of characters as a block like you did to copy and paste , then to activate the command. Experiment with your word processor to see how it works. A font is defined in computing as a combination of a special character set and type size.
In the typewriter world, you were pretty much stuck with the size and style of letters the typewriter came with. Some of the later typewriters had the characters on a ball you could change, but you still had very little control of exactly how the letters looked.
In a modern word processing application, you have a great deal of control. You can choose different type faces that look like script, handwriting, Old English, or whatever.
After you have chosen a basic look for your letters, you can choose what size the letters are. Fonts are measured by typesetters in points. Most standard text is 10 points. A newspaper headline might be points. You may be able to control other attributes of each letter, such as its color, a shadow, and other advanced features. Most writing is organized into paragraphs. These divisions make a document easier to read. There are ways you can control how paragraphs look on the screen.
You can control how your program handles indention. You can often force the computer to indent the first line of every paragraph automatically. You can also frequently control the line spacing inside the paragraph, the amount of spacing between paragraphs, and the justification. Justification refers to how the text is lined up between the margins. Most documents created with a typewriter or word processor are left-justified. That means that the left margin is lined up perfectly, but the right margin is a little ragged.
The computer keeps track of the right margin for you when you use a word processor, so you don't have to press the "Enter" key at the end of every line in fact you shouldn't press "Enter" at the end of every line. The only time you should press "Enter" is when you want to end a paragraph!
The automatic process the computer uses to send text to the next line is called word wrap. If you want to have the right margin line up cleanly, but let the left one be a little ragged Maybe as you type the return address and date of a business letter you can choose a right justify command.
If you look at books and magazines, you will see that both the right and left columns are justified. Many word processors will allow you to justify both margins. This works by adjusting the amount of space between letters and words so the margins work out perfectly. The computer does it automatically when you ask it to do so. Another form of justification is centering.
When you center a line, you tell the program to give it equal left and right margins, regardless of the length of the line. Centering is useful for headlines, but is often distracting when used for body text. The other major element of a document is the page. There are some page formatting commands you should be able to find in any word processor as well.
You will probably have some way to adjust the margins of the page. Note that there are top and bottom margins, as well as left and right margins.
Headers and footers are special areas at the top and bottom, respectively, of the page. These areas are not used for regular text, but reserved for special things like a title at the top of every page, page numbers, and footnotes. You will have to experiment a little to see how your word processor handles these features, but they are well worth learning.
You will never go back to the old way of writing footnotes once you have mastered using footers to automate the process. One more page formatting command you might find useful is page orientation. The source file must be processed to produce a version that can be viewed or printed. A Web browser can be looked on as a modern text formatter; it processes and displays or prints HTML source files.
Typesetting package: A typesetting package is used like text formatter is used that is, you create an source file containing text and formatting commands, and process it to generate a separate output file , but a typesetting package allows even more control over the appearance of your output than a text formatter. You have control of almost every aspect of the formatting, including the spacing.
It is often more difficult to use a typesetting package than a text formatter, but a typesetting package can often produce better looking results. Document Layout Package: The production of a larger word processing project such as a major paper or a thesis can be facilitated by the use of a document layout package.
When you use a document layout package, instead of your concerning yourself with the placement of your text on the page, you identify it as belonging to specific components of your document, such as the title page, a heading, a paragraph, a figure or table, a bibliography.
A document layout package gives you a choice of several layouts for your document in which the document components may be formatted differently. You can also download a free program, such as OpenOffice, which opens and saves documents in multiple formats, including some that are compatible with Word.
Google Docs offers a free online option for word processing; one of its advantages is the capacity to access documents remotely. To find your way with word processing, you can start out with simple documents such as a letter or memo, and then add other formatting. Larger fonts work for headlines and subheads, while bold-faced or italics add emphasis and bullet points highlight vital concepts, each on its own line.
All these features are accessible in the formatting menu of your word-processing software, but many have keyboard shortcuts.
For example, typing "Ctrl-B" creates boldfaced type. You don't have to put together every document from scratch.
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