This time, let's take a look at the way this booklet was put
together, after all, it is almost entirely a product of computers!

    ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
contains a complete set of alphanumeric symbols for use in English.
Almost any kind of computer uses ASCII to map what gets typed at
the keyboard into numbers that the computer can store in memory
or onto a disc drive. A font is the style in which the symbols appear
on the screen or on paper. You will notice that there are many
different styles of type used in this booklet. These are all different
fonts. The size of the font is also controllable. A word processor is
a program that allows one to create complex layouts of text and
pictures combining ASCII, typed in by the user, with a font and a
size. Good word processors have advanced ways of placing text on
the page; in columns or frames, left, right, or center aligned.

    This booklet is a stack of 8.5" x 11" paper, printed on both sides,|
stapled in the middle and folded in half. Each side of all of these
pages was laid out on the computer and printed, only once, with a
360 dpi ink jet printer on high quality bright white paper. (That just
happens to be the type of printer we have. That is not a standard.)
This original print is known as camera ready art. Once we have all
of the pages needed to make the book, we take them to be
photographed by a special machine that makes a plate for an offset
printing press, and the rest is no longer a computer story.

    The trickiest part about creating the art is in dealing with graphic
images; most especially pictures that have shades of gray in them.
In printing, there is no such thing as gray ink --only black. The
picture has to be converted into a fine screen of little dots of various
sizes. This is called an angle-dot-screen. The photo of Princess
Stephanie on the back of this issue is a good example of one. Ink jet
printers don't normally print pictures this way, so each picture must
be prepared before it is printed the first time.

    Color, like we have on the cover, requires two passes under the
offset printing press, one for each color, pink and black. Therefore,
two separate pieces of camera ready art are needed. Interestingly,
the camera ready art for the pink is still printed with black ink. The
placement of the ink is the only thing that the art portrays, and the
camera only sees black and white. Any color of ink could have been
used to print the triangles behind the text and design on the cover.

    After all of the pages are prepared and delivered to the shop
that prints it in mass, I go about the task of reproducing the
contents of each page in hypertext markup language, a code used
to create pages for viewing on The World Wide Web. About the
same time that the paper version of this publication is getting out
to you, the public, the files that put it out there for the rest of the
world are transferred to our Rainbow server. And one more issue
of what's up is in the can!                                                         JL :o)