Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P23 ppsx

✦ However, if you give or send someone a WordPad file that includes a link, you have to send along a copy of the original object or embed the final version of the object in your document

Sweating the Small Stuff: Text Editors 194

To move past the first “find” and continue searching, click Find Next or press F3 You can keep doing this until you reach the end of the file

To replace specific characters or words, do this:

1.Click Edit ➪ Replace

2.Type the characters you want to locate in the Find What box

3.In the Replace With box, type in the text you want to insert in its place.

4.Click Find Next

5.When the text you want to replace appears, click Replace.

To replace all instances of the searched-for characters, click Replace All

Embedding or linking objects in WordPad

Embedded objects (including images and other files) in a WordPad document

become part of the file

✦ The good news is that if you give or send someone a copy of the file, the embedded material will accompany it

✦ The possibly bad news is that if you change the original object after embedding it in a file, that change isn’t reflected in the WordPad docu-ment That is, unless you remove the original embedded object and replace it with the changed one

An object also can look as if it’s part of your file if you link to it When you

link an object, the object remains in its original location but a reference to it

is created in the WordPad file

✦ If you change an object that’s linked to a WordPad file, the changes appear in the document when you view it onscreen or printed out

✦ However, if you give or send someone a WordPad file that includes a link, you have to send along a copy of the original object (or embed the final version of the object in your document)

To embed or link an object, follow the following path:

1.Click Insert ➪ Object ➪ Create from File.

2.Type the path and filename in the File Box.

Or click Browse and find the file you want to embed or link

3.To link to an object, click the Link check box.

If you want to embed the object, make sure the Link check box is cleared

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Sweating the Small Stuff: Text Editors 195

You can also embed an object by creating or opening it in its original program and using the Copy ➪ Paste command Similarly, you can link an object by choosing Copy ➪ Paste Special

Formatting text WordPad allows basic formatting, including font sizes and emphasis includ-ing italics, boldface, and underlines

The simplified menu bar at the top of the document is one of two pathways to assigning formatting; you can find pull-down menus for font, size, and text encoding If you don’t know what text encoding is, that’s because you’re so Roman No, I don’t mean you’re of Italian heritage (not that there’s anything wrong with that)

The English language, along with most other forms of written

communica-tion, uses a character set based on Roman (sometimes called Latin) letters.

In the world of Microsoft, Roman is sometimes called Western, which is a bit

less precise The other options for encoding offered by WordPad are Arabic, Baltic, Central European, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, and Vietnamese

Why no Japanese or Chinese or other such languages? Well there are ways

to construct characters in those languages but they’re based on adaptations

of the Roman keyboard

Until and unless you instruct your computer (actually, your operating system) that you’ll be working with a non-Roman character set, WordPad always puts you back in the Western World

Surprisingly, WordPad’s paragraph-alignment function is actually a bit easier

to use than the similar facility in some word processors:

1.Click anywhere in the paragraph you want to align

You don’t need to highlight all the text in the paragraph

2.Click Format ➪ Paragraph

See Figure 2-6

3.Click one of the options in the Alignment section:

• Left

• Right

• Center

Sweating the Small Stuff: Text Editors 196

Similarly, to indent a paragraph, follow along:

1.Click anywhere in the block of text

2.Click Format ➪ Paragraph

3.Enter a measurement in the Indentation section.

The measurement should be in inches for the amount of space you want

to the left or right (or both sides) of the paragraph You can also choose

an indent for just the first line

To set or remove tab stops in paragraphs, follow along:

1.Select the paragraphs you want to work on

2.Click Format ➪ Tabs.

3.Type a number in the Tab Stop box

The measurement can be in inches or decimal fractions of an inch

4.Click Set.

A new tab stop is created

Figure 2-6:

WordPad includes the basics of most word processing;

think of it as bells but no whistles

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Manipulating Images 197

To delete a tab stop, do this:

1.Select the paragraphs you want to work on

2.Click Format ➪ Tabs.

3.Click a tab stop it in the list.

4.Click Clear

To clear all tab stops in the selected paragraph, click Clear All

Another way to set tab stops is to click where on the ruler you want them To delete tab stops, click the marker for the tab and hold the mouse button down

as you drag it off the ruler On the ruler, a tab stop looks like an egg timer

Manipulating Images

I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like On my not-too-short list

of masterpieces is an astounding photograph of Pablo Picasso taken way back in the prehistoric era The summer of 1949, to be precise In the photo

by Gjon Mili, Picasso sketches a phantasmagoric centaur in the air using a flashlight This was 40 years before PhotoShop existed as a noun, a verb, or

a computer program But the concept remains the same: drawing with light

The big guys:

✦ Adobe PhotoShop The Bigfoot of the image industry It’s by far the

most popular power tool for photo editing and for painting with light (think of your onscreen cursor as Picasso’s flashlight)

✦ Picasa by Google (free)

✦ Paint Shop Pro Photo by Corel.

A number of basic programs are included with the purchase of a digital camera

If you’re going to get serious about using a digital camera, creating your own artwork, or capturing images of the screens you see (or the contents of Web pages), you need to add a capable image-editing program But the wizards of Microsoft will get you started with a pair of basic tools included with current versions of Windows:

✦ Paint

✦ Windows Photo Gallery (part of Windows Vista)

Manipulating Images 198

Paint Pure and simple, Paint allows you to open most existing digital images and

✦ Convert to another format

✦ Change size

✦ Make simple resolution adjustments

✦ Draw on a picture (just like — well, almost like — Picasso)

On the painting side, the program offers a small set of tools including

✦ Paint brushes

✦ Pencils

✦ Airbrushes

✦ Erasers

✦ Text You can create your own masterpiece from scratch, or draw a mustache on a photograph of the Mona Lisa

Opening Paint Paint is in the standard set of accessories installed with Windows You can open it in either of these two ways:

✦ Click Windows Button ➪ All Programs ➪ Accessories ➪ Paint

✦ Click a shortcut to Paint that you have created on the Desktop, or that you have pinned to the Start menu of Windows If you recently used Paint, a temporary shortcut already exists on the Start menu

To open an existing image stored on your laptop or on an attached networked device, click File ➪ Open You can do this in one step by pressing Ctrl + O

By default, the program looks for images in the Pictures folder that is set up with the installation of Windows But you can navigate to other folders by clicking one of the Favorite Links shown on the left side of the Open screen Paint works with most common current file formats:

✦ BMP Bitmap files stored with a bmp or dib filename extension.

✦ JPG JPEG compressed images with a filename extension of jpg, jpeg,

.jpe, or jfif

✦ GIF GIF compressed images with a gif filename extension.

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✦ TIFF Uncompressed TIFF files with a filename extension of TIF or TIFF.

✦ PNG PNG files with a png filename extension.

✦ ICO Icon files stored with a ico filename extension.

Working with images in Paint You have several options when it comes to working with images Work on one

✦ Uploaded from a digital camera

✦ Taken by pressing the Print Screen key

✦ Captured from an online source

If you have an image on your computer, start work this way:

1.Open Paint.

2.Go to the image file from the Open window

3.Double-click the image’s icon.

It opens in the editor Windows makes it easy to find images by offering a small thumbnail version of the picture See Figure 2-7

Figure 2-7:

From within Paint, you can open stored images of the proper file type for manip-ulation

Manipulating Images 200

If you open Paint without loading an existing file, you can begin work with the paint tools immediately and then choose a storage format when you’re ready to save your work

You can use any of the standard file formats for your masterpiece, but generally it’s good practice to at least temporarily save your work in a high-resolution, uncompressed format like TIFF; once you complete your work, save the file in a smaller format like JPG or GIF

1.Press the Print Screen key

A copy of the memory’s image of the screen is captured This step is just temporary

2.Press Print Screen again

The first image is replaced with a later version

You can hold onto the contents of a Print Screen command by pasting the memory contents into an image editor, and Paint does just fine for that purpose

3.Open Paint

4.Click the blank canvas

5.Do one of the following:

• Press Ctrl + V.

• Click Edit ➪ Paste.

Unless the web site developer has blocked your ability to do so, you have a third way to capture an image from what you see onscreen:

1.Go to a web site

2.Right-click a picture.

3.Choose Save Picture As

4.Choose JPEG

This way you get obtain a high-quality copy

5.Select a filename.

6.Choose a location for storage

Now you can open that file from within Paint (or other image editors) and edit it

You can use Print Screen to grab an image of work you created on your own laptop or capture a picture of a web site Similarly, you can use Save As to copy an image you find on a web site or in certain other displays Remember, though, many images on web sites or in programs are copyrighted; get

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Manipulating Images 201

permission from the owner if you intend to use someone else’s intellectual property in a work of your own

Once you have the image within Paint, you can do the following, among other things:

✦ Crop

✦ Resize

✦ Flip (rotating it as if you were turning over a transparent piece of paper)

✦ Invert the colors from positive to negative; see Figure 2-8 The final, crucial, step is to save your image in a form that lets you use it or retrieve and edit it in a more-capable image editor I suggest always saving a copy in TIFF format, which creates an uncompressed version of what you see onscreen When you’re ready to use your work for other purposes, you can save a second copy as a

✦ JPEG for e-mailing to someone else for further editing

✦ GIF for display on a web page or as a small image on your laptop

Figure 2-8:

A photo from my personal collection, open for basic editing in Paint

Manipulating Images 202

While space on a hard disk drive is a precious commodity, a number of

alter-natives are available if you want to keep images at their highest possible quality

✦ External drive

✦ Flash memory key

✦ Burn them to a CD or DVD disc Once an image is reduced in quality (by cutting its resolution or number of colors or by compressing it using a lossy technology such as JPEG or GIF), it can never be fully restored

Painting with Paint Enough about photography; break out the paintbrush Again, Paint offers all the basics of an illustration program, and I’m convinced that our friend Pablo Picasso could use it to create an amazing work of art

It comes with a paintbrush, which is a good place to start And there’s an electronic pencil and a computer-assisted airbrush The icon for the air-brush looks more like a can of spray paint, and that may be a very good metaphor for this program’s capabilities: as a free basic tool, this program is not to be confused with a full-featured program like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw which allow an almost limitless number of adjustments to the width, hardness (an electronic equivalent of the stiffness or contour of the brush, including the amount of “paint” it applies), and other such refinements You can undo any action you take — drawing a line, brushing a stroke, filling with color, or erasing a portion of an image — by clicking Edit ➪ Undo

Alternatively, you can click Ctrl + Z To redo something you’ve undone

(aren’t computer’s wonderful?), choose Edit ➪ Redo or click Ctrl + Y

Table 2-1 has the essential tools available to artists like you and me

portion of the image

Free-Form Select Reach into an image to draw a line of any shape

to select a portion of the picture

eraser (a pop-up menu shows four sizes) to overwrite any portion of the image with the background color

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Manipulating Images 203

Fill With Color If you selected an area of the image, fill the

inside of that shape with whatever color you chose from the palette If you selected nothing, this tool fills the entire image with the chosen color

palette; you can assign the color as the fore-ground or backfore-ground color of the image See Figure 2-9

directly on the picture or use the slider that appears on the toolbar

Pencil or Brush Draw straight lines or curves with an electronic

pencil or paintbrush You can draw in color by selecting a color from the palette; to draw using the background color, press and hold the right mouse button as you move the onscreen pointer

pro-gram includes three spray patterns, from a small and tight cluster to a larger and more diffuse design Choose a color from the palette or use the background color by right-clicking as you drag the pointer onscreen

icon; you’re offered a background style and a color palette Click inside the picture and enter text from the keyboard You can move or resize the text box; change the font, size, and format-ting up until the moment you click another tool and click outside of the text box in the picture;

after that the text is assigned and can’t be edited

Line tools (including Line and Curve) Insert exactly what’s promised Choose a color

and then drag the pointer; to draw a straight line

or a curve using the background color, press and hold the right mouse button while you drag the pointer The Curve tool adds an extra wrin-kle: Start with a straight line and then click where you want the arc Drag the pointer to adjust the curve

Rectangle and Rounded Rectangle Draw closed boxes with square or rounded

cor-ners Drag the pointer diagonally from one corner up or down to create a box; to make a square hold the Shift button while dragging the pointer You can choose color from the palette or press and hold the right mouse button to use the background color

(continued)