High all and welcome to the 'All is Revealed' section!
This new column will help you get to grips with all the newest and commonest computing Jargon. After a few issues you'll be able to impress the Mac operators in the canteen at lunchtime or understand that 3,000-page manual you've been meaning to read since last Christmas.
Acrobat-PDF
Portable Document Format [PDF] seems to be the in 'word' right now. Adobe's Acrobat allows you the freedom to publish a document that can be viewed virtually on any machine. PDF supports quite advanced page layouts and graphics. Far more advanced than DocMaker stand alone files.
CMYK
No not a new word for the YMCA but the format mostly used for high-resolution printing. Sometimes referred to as the Four printing colours: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and K stands for Black. Using CMYK on screen lets you see what you'll be printing.
DPI
Dots Per Inch. You hear this all the time and when you see printers advertised the higher the DPI the better the print output you'll get from that machine. 600 DPI is just that, 600 dots per inch. 600 DPI would be a fairly good BW/Grey scale laser printer, but for colour a 1200 DPI would be much better [and more expensive].
DTP
This acronym was the 'IT' word for the last 15 years, Desktop Publishing [DTP] was the term coined for being able to design on a small scale graphically please work such as newsletters, newspapers and more. DTP went hand in hand with the Mac and the first 128k Macintosh was the first easy to use publishing system for the amateur and low end user. These days things have changed slightly you can now produce great looking work on a budget, get a second hand copy of Quark Xpress, PhotoShop 5, a PPC/G3 and a 1200+DPI printer and you'll be producing fantastic looking work.
Gig or Gb [1 Gb = 1,073,741,824 Bytes]
As machines get more and more powerful and memory intensive the little megabyte is getting pushed aside. The now needed gigabyte is becoming more common. A Gb is 1024 times that of a single megabyte.
GUI
The Graphical User Interface is the way the computer looks on screen and the way you navigate through your computer system, obviously the Mac is one of the best examples of a great GUI if you're using system 8. Apple can't really say it invented back in the late 70's and 80's companies like Xerox was developing the GUI concept. Apple just implemented its uses better with the release of the 128k Mac back in '84.
Mind you then you have Innovators and Implementers you also get to have Impostors i.e. Windows 3.1/95/98.
HTML
HyperText Mark-up Language. The standard format for designing web pages. There are a few new variation such as Dynamic HTML but all the leading Web design packages read and export this format.
Scratch Disk
If you use PhotoShop you'll now what this is. When you use memory hungry programmes such as PhotoShop, they can run out of RAM [Random Access Memory] so they have to use actual hard disk space if you have it spare to temporally store work already open. I use PhotoShop with about 80 meg of real RAM and the damn thing still wants more!
SCSI'
Good old 'Small Computer System Interface', nearly everyone reading this has something attached to his or her machine be it a Zip, printer, scanner and they'll probably be SCSI. All the old Macs use SCSI the system by which you could attach devices in chains along the desktop with leads all over the place.
Ah the fond memories of endless hours fiddling with terminators and leads just to get the printer to work at the same time as your external hard drive is crashing and the Zip drive will not mount. Which neatly 'leads' me on to the following.
USB
The 'NOW' word for Mac users, well iMac users. A new connection standard built in to the new generation of Macs for Next year. Far more versatile than ADB and SCSI ports both in speed and the amount of hardware that can be attached to a single machine.
Ok that little lot should keep you amused and a step ahead of that new bloke in accounts until next month happy Mac'ing.
