Text, pictures and multimedia

Displaying and changing text is the most familiar form of information that most people undertake on computers. Word-processing programs are designed to make this task easy so that you can type (or even dictate) words and sentences into the computer, then make changes to alter the content of this information (by adding, deleting or redrafting) or its form (by changing the font, size or style). As computers have become more sophisticated it has become easier to add pictures to text, whether these are produced on a computer (such as clip art or drawn or painted in another program) or by other means (such as scanned-in drawings or digital photographs). Specific software helps you to work with pictures (images and graphics) more effectively, and you will need to understand the implications of the way computers work with pictures. Adding photographs, sound or video clips to a page of text is now relatively straightforward and most computers now offer full multimedia capabilities where such combinations are easy to achieve. This ranges from just putting together text and pictures to more sophisticated combinations of words, pictures, sound or video.