First Lab

Uni Day 1:

I have gone through the first exercise in Digital Information Technologies and Architecture and am going to write up my thoughts and process.

It seems I am familiar enough with saving into various formats, but I am still discovering new information. ASCII was an area I had little understanding of, seems that is still the case but now I can say it is 'gobbledegook' and everyone else is using the same terminology.

So this is how I went through the exercise:

First of all, I created a Wordpad file with a bit of text - "Currently there are 21 people in the room" - which at the time was correct. Once closed in Wordpad, I opened the .txt file in Explorer and had a look:

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang2057{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}}
{\*\generator Msftedit 5.41.15.1515;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\f0\fs20 Currently there are 21 people in the room.\par
}

So far I recognise the text, the font style and everything else is 'gobbledegook'.

Next task was to open in Word and play around, I decided to embolden the text, change the type to Calibri (my preferred style) and made it a little larger.

Now I have changed a few variables, I open it into notepad and see what I was expecting...gobbledegook.

Íoo6¯h4ÇCÔvžDL±¤ eök)©l±×”86îÔ.ôš£ ôºüÐ
ÊUš>É0Í€ü"Sì+ a_݃( ›ÿÏvuÝ•øâÊc–¯TÈ/<¼!s¼ ÅX d 3‰´ ¯ƒ¬– ¡? 'g ![  ?óü 4ê¹úÇ%ë9Ž þ¶RŽk6Çð°$Cí, ú`& gë !/ =ÿ ÿÿ PK ! Ÿ :Ok word/document.xmlÌTÛŽÓ0 }Gâ ¢¼·IË %ÚvUµ»‚ PÕ]>ÀMœÆ‹í±l§¡ûõÌ8—í XU< )r<ÇsæÌ%¾¾ù©dtàÖ Ðóx2Nãˆë
¡÷óøûÃÝh GÎ3]0 šÏã#wñÍâí›ë&+ ¯ ×>B
í² ¢•÷&K —W\17 Ã5‚%XÅQÌþ¨Í( e˜ ;!…?&Ó4ý w40k«³Žb¤DnÁAéÉ%ƒ² 9ï–ÞÃ^ ·õ\w’CÄÄr‰ @»J ׳©eà «žäðZ %ûs¹$ZaYƒýP²•Ý€-Œ…œ;‡Öu Œ“ôµØ] ‰bð¸D¢½ Å„ hh:Îú?4oŒÍKÚØ Q='‚µXà,í 8Òj¢&ÃY,¶ó8ힸ7m°Ñi:Y¿»]

This is only a small example. For an experiment I copy/pasted the characters from the notepad doc to a fresh Word doc. It came to 577 words stretched across 56 pages. All for the original 8 words "Currently there are 21 people in the room"

Here I just want to directly quote the text supplied after this task in the exercise, a little information about ASCII that I found useful.

"The binary information has not been translated into ASCII that we can easily interpret. Whilst some of the 7-bit strings are interpreted as orders of characters that make sense to us, many of them do not relate to ASCII codes that make any sense in combination and so we see all sorts of data that cannot be interpreted meaningfully as text. The document that we have created is a binary file that is interpreted by one particular word processor (MS Word), but does not apparently rely solely upon ASCII encoding. So we cannot read the document without 'Word' and other word processors may not understand the data format - the agreed way in which sequences of bits and bytes are translated into information that is understood by computer programs.

We have seen that there are ways of marking documents up in ASCII to add formatting. Here we will specifically save our document using one such format. HTML is a language that marks text up for presentation using agreed tags. It uses alphanumeric characters and so relies upon a text format like ASCII. We will learn more about HTML as the module progresses. It supports a document-centred view of information and is designed for creating documents that share files and refer to one another across the Internet."

So rather than opening a Word document in notepad, the next stage is to identify some of the HTML. So I have opened the Word file and saved it as a Webpage, which can now be opened with notepad to reveal the HTML.

It looks more familiar than the above ASCII, I can see HEAD and BODY and a couple of /DIV thrown in. But there is a lot of text I am not familiar with (such as meta tags, w:, o:) and I get lost trying to find my original sentence. I found the words at the bottom of the page hidden in this paragraph.

[p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:
normal;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'][b][span
style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Cambria","serif";mso-ascii-theme-font:
major-latin;mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial']Currently
there are 21 people in the room.[o:p][/o:p][/span][/b][/p]

Again, this is only for 8 words, but again I copied this into Word to check it out and found the total text in the notepad document comes to 1,528 words stretched across 18 pages.

Now we are going to play with images.

In my task, I went away from Weather text and kept with People In The Room, I found a nice picture of people in a room. Here it is, for any interested. Don't they look happy to be in a room?

One I had got my image and saved it to the same folder I then inserted it to the Word document with 'Link to File' - a shortcut that I have never used before, but keeps the two separate. If I change the image in the directory, it will change in the Word document, good tip. In fact, I think I'll quote the related text.

The 'Link to file' option means that the document does not physically contain or save the imagery independently of the original image file. Rather it saves a link to the location of the file on the computer and knows to incorporate the information from the file in which the image is stored when the document is displayed. This means that if the image file is changed, the image in the document will be updated. View the ASCII code generated by Word when it saved your document in Notepad.

Now I have linked the image into the Word document, I want to analyse the notepad version and look at the HTML.

My experience with HTML has all been online, I am used to searching for images in the HTML with tags resembling these:

{a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/example/" title="IMAG1242 by The Username I Have, on Flickr"}{img src="http://farm7.static.flickr.com/numbers/morenumbers_c8bc96c91c.jpg" width="500" height="376" alt="IMAG1242"}{/a}

However, I am looking through notepad and can't see my image anywhere. I copy the notepad text and copy it into Word to check the word length and pages on the assumption that making a piece of text bold turns it into thousands of words, adding an image (or rather linking an image) will make it tens of thousands. In actual fact it adds 2 pages to the last version and only another 98 words. Very odd.

And that is the task. I have created a few files of varying formats, .txt, .docx, .jpg, and a html file. I have learnt about linking images to documents. Also, I am beginning to grasp ACSII, which up till now was mostly used by myself to draw pictures in notepad.