Chapter 2: text

Using text in multimedia

The text suggests creating a project with minimal text complexity, relying instead on
images and symbols to guide users. The design would use visual elements for
navigation, utilizing voice and sound sparingly as constant use might become tiresome.
The proposal advocates for the efficiency of a simple menu system with clear text for
titles, headlines, menus, navigation, and content, emphasizing the ease of
understanding through visual cues and limited text.
Designing with text
The text highlights the challenge of delivering effective and concise text messages on
computer screens with limited space. It emphasizes the importance of adjusting font
size and the number of headlines based on the complexity of the message and its
context. For interactive projects or websites where users seek information, a balance
must be struck between providing enough text for seekers to navigate and avoiding an
overwhelming amount. On the other hand, when creating presentation slides for public
speaking, the focus should be on large fonts, bulleted points, and minimal text to
support the live presentation, allowing the audience to concentrate on the speaker
rather than reading detailed points on the screen.
Symbols and icons
Symbols in multimedia are graphical constructs with concentrated text, functioning as
visual words that convey meaningful messages. Icons, like the trash can or hourglass,
are symbolic representations common in graphical user interfaces. While text is
efficient, multimedia allows blending text and icons, leveraging images, sounds, and
motion to enhance message impact.
Menus of navigation
Simple menus, often with text lists, enable users to choose topics and proceed. Text is
crucial for providing cues about the user's location within the content, especially in
complex navigation scenarios. A continuous display of interactive textual or symbolic
lists helps users track their path, providing flexibility to skip steps or return to previous
locations. Web designers often include Main Menus and "breadcrumbs" to offer users
clear navigation and indicate their current location within the virtual space.
HTML documents
The standard document format for displaying text on the web is Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML), allowing specification of typefaces, sizes, and colors through tags.
HTML, accompanied by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), is the foundation of web
activity, but the growth of the web is pushing beyond traditional text displays. HTML
Version 5 introduces multimedia capabilities with elements like <canvas> for graphics
and support for video and audio playback. However, HTML lacks flexibility for creating
aesthetically pleasing text elements, often relying on graphical bitmaps or Flash
animation.
Computers and text
Apple chose to adopt a monitor resolution of 72 pixels per inch for the Macintosh,
aligning with the printing industry standard, enabling WYSIWYG experiences for
desktop publishers, and introducing square-shaped pixels for even measurements,
which contrasted with the earlier trend of taller pixels.
Unicode
The Unicode, a 16-bit architecture introduced in 1989, which addresses the challenge of
handling diverse international language alphabets in computer programs, allowing for
the representation of characters from all known languages and alphabets worldwide,
unifying shared symbols and accommodating various scripts, thus facilitating cross-
cultural software development and communication.
Languages in the World of Computers
The text explains the contrast between Western and Eastern languages in terms of
word representation, highlighting those Eastern languages, like Chinese and Japanese,
often use single symbols for entire concepts. It further explores the concept of
alphabets, noting variations in English, Japanese, and Russian. The global adoption of
Arabic numerals is emphasized for their simplicity in representing decimal numbers. The
term "localization" is introduced for translating or designing multimedia into different
languages, involving considerations such as date formats and special characters unique
to each language, even within Western languages sharing the Roman alphabet.
Fontlab
Fontlab, Ltd. specializes in font editors for Macintosh and Windows, available at
www.fontlab.com. The software allows the development of PostScript, TrueType, and
OpenType fonts for various platforms, and designers can modify existing typefaces,
incorporate PostScript artwork, trace scanned images, and create fonts from scratch.
Fontographer, a featured tool, offers a freehand drawing tool for precise designs,
enabling the creation of multiple font designs and adjustments to the weight of an entire
typeface for lighter or heavier fonts.
Making Pretty Text
To enhance the visual appeal of text, designers use a variety of fonts and graphics
applications that can manipulate characters into intricate artwork through stretching,
shading, coloring, and anti-aliasing. Creating visually pleasing type often starts with
ready-made fonts, although some designers opt for custom fonts using font editing
tools. Image-editing and painting applications provide flexibility, allowing users to
customize text styles, colorize, stretch, squeeze, and rotate.
Hypermedia and Hypertext
Multimedia becomes interactive multimedia when users control what and when
information is viewed, and it becomes hypermedia when a structured system of linked
elements allows navigation and interaction. In hypertext systems, indexed text elements
are linked, enabling rapid retrieval, nonlinear navigation, and associative browsing.
Hypertext, a key feature of the World Wide Web, organizes cross-linked words, images,
sounds, and exhibits.
The Power of Hypertext
In a fully indexed hypertext system, efficient search-and-retrieval capabilities enable
users to find specific information within vast datasets. The power of computerized
search systems is acknowledged, but the need for meaningful organization and links
among information is emphasized. The text raises concerns about who designs the
lenses (filtering mechanisms) in multimedia projects, highlighting the potential impact on
shaping human culture and the ethical responsibility of designers to maintain impartial
focus amid the vastness of information.
Using Hypertext
Special programs for information management and hypertext are designed for
presenting electronic text, images, and various elements in a database format. These
commercial systems are utilized for complex mixtures of text and images, such as
detailed manuals, parts catalogs, reference materials, and legal libraries. Hypertext
databases on the web employ proprietary indexing systems for fast cross-referencing,
with indexes sometimes reaching 50-100% of the document's size. Commercial
hypertext systems were initially developed for retrofitting extensive information, often
requiring CD-ROMs or dedicated hard disks.