15th Entry

First of all, sorry this is a bit late! I can honestly say I completely forgot. I suddenly remembered at about 1:30am this morning in a heart shocking moment. I blame the Forensics coursework myself!

Anyway back to the point… Friday’s lecture was about text in multimedia. Not the most fascinating subject in the world but necessary to develop an appreciation for it while designing.

We started off with the question is a picture worth a thousand words. It odiously isn’t otherwise we would all be creating pictures to describe lectures instead of writing down notes. While the saying isn’t completely true, it does contain some truth element in that pictures can sometimes convey information, particularly emotion more effectively than text.

Text can be used for many things in application development such as content, interface, menus, instructions and sometimes even for decoration.

Even with text, you still need to do some planning. You need to ask yourself what the purpose is, who is your audience and how will they use it, will they read it on screen, print it, copy and paste etc. Also what mood do you want to create, serious and formal or light hearted and informal.

Text is created onscreen using ASCII code where each letter is given a code. A glyph is a name given to text characters. Glyphs can be bitmapped or outlined.

Bitmapped glyphs are similar to bitmap graphics in that they are created from pixels. Each letter is actually a picture that has been individually designed by the author.

Outlined glyphs are similar to vector graphics where each character is created from a mathematical equation. This allows for some automation when scaling the text and adding effects. Outlined glyphs come in two forms, postscript and true type. Both are very similar but have different ways for producing the characters.

Text can also be used as graphics by using a series of effects on the text, logos are a good example of this.

It’s interesting to note that the point size of the text does not actually fully relate to it’s size. The widths and heights of fonts are unique to the font.

Like I said, not the most interesting subject in the world but still very important none the less. Daniel always seems to make the lecture entertaining in his own way. It’s a nice lecture to have as the last lesson of Friday afternoon, where you can just sit back, relax and enjoy some of the finer points of multimedia you never before even thought about… bliss!

Friday’s tutorial was similar to last week’s except we went into a bit more detail with Dreamweaver, CCS and XHTML.

First we downloaded a CSS template from a website. We then applied the different styles from the CSS file into the XHTML page using the div tag.

We then experimented with borders, applying different colours and styles to them.

Finally we added experimented with some layers.

The CSS part of this tutorial is quite interesting since I’ve never properly worked with CSS before but everything else just feels really basic. I kind of wish we could be given something really challenging which will make us think and experiment with some of the advanced features of the code itself. But I know some people haven’t done this before so I guess I can’t complain.

For my inderpendant reading this week I’ve got the specifications of CSS as outlined by W3 and some advice for using text within multimedia applications. See you next week!

1. CSS guidelines

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/#specs

Last accessed: 13/02/08

2. Text in multimedia

http://www.ucc.ie/hfrg/emmus/guidelines/d41text.html

Last accessed: 13/02/08