Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [62]
– Character count: Users should know how to count the lines and characters in any text file, and in any span of highlighted text within the file. (In TextWrangler this is available via the “Get Info” command, but other text editors may call it something different.)
– Change case: Users should be familiar with the “Change Case” (or equivalent) feature, for changing a range of text to ALL CAPITALS, all lower case, or Capitalized Words Only.
– Educating and dumbing down quotes: Users should know the difference between “smart quotes” and more ASCII-friendly "dumb quotes" and be able to change an entire file from one to the other. (Similarly, users should also know smart apostrophes from ASCII apostrophes, also known as hash marks: here’s a smart apostrophe, and here's a hash mark.) This is usually available via an “Educate Quotes” feature in the text editor.
– Opening non-text files: Any good text editor can open a non-ASCII file, like a Word document, and show all the data inside (as demonstrated in the file formats chapter). Users should know how to do this with the Open File command.
Basic image editing
The photos chapter covered how to organize a photo bitstream, but users should also know how to make basic edits to individual files. These are akin to the basic text-editing functions that all computer users learn—adding, selecting, editing, and deleting words. Strangely, most users are never taught the equivalent skills in photos; this is unfortunate, as digital images are becoming more prevalent and important in users’ day-to-day lives.
These are the basic image-editing functions that all bit-literate users should know:
cropping
changing brightness and contrast
resizing
adding simple elements like lines, circles, and text to the image—for example, to highlight a certain element
e-mailing one or more images
These are all easy skills to learn, and they don’t require an expensive tool like Photoshop. All but one, in fact, are included in popular and free photo tools like iPhoto and Picasa. (The exception is adding simple elements, which is easily done with GraphicConverter, included for free on many Macs, and most Windows paint programs.) Resizing and e-mailing images need some extra explanation, though, since they are increasingly common operations for the average user.
Resizing an image is mainly important when e-mailing photos. Digital cameras with five or more megapixels create huge image files, and attaching multiple photos to a single e-mail may make the e-mail too big for recipients’ inboxes to accept. (And depending on the recipients’ image-viewing software, the images may be too large to view easily on the screen.) Thus it’s important to understand the difference between full-sized and e-mail-sized images.
Full-sized images, the original files from the camera, are mostly useful for printing, since they have such high resolution.48 But they’re not appropriate for e-mailing, since they’re so big. Unless the recipient wants to print out the photos, there’s no need to send full-sized images. Instead, to prepare photos for e-mailing, resize them to either 800 by 600 pixels, or 640 by 480 pixels. (On the Mac, iPhoto makes this process really easy: just click “Email”, then choose “Medium” in the size menu that pops up.) This guarantees that the e-mail won’t be too big for recipients, and that the images will be displayed in an appropriate size.
It’s also important to use a descriptive Subject line when e-mailing photos. There’s no need to rename the photo files from their original camera-assigned names (like “DSC01325.JPG”), but the Subject line should communicate to recipients what the photos are about. And be sure to filter the photos beforehand (as described in the managing