Text in Multimedia System and Design (2024)

Multimedia System Design: Text

 

Introduction:

•  All multimedia content consists of texts in some form. Even a menu text is accompanied by a single action such as mouse click, keystroke or finger pressed in the monitor (in case of a touch screen).
• The text in the multimedia is used to communicate information to the user.
•  Proper use of text and words in multimedia presentation will help the content developer to communicate the idea and message to the user.

 

Multimedia Building Blocks:

Any multimedia application consists any or all of the following components :

1. Text :

•    Text and symbols are very important for communication in any medium.
•   With the recent explosion of the Internet and World Wide Web, text has become more the important than ever.
•  Web is HTML (Hyper text Markup language) originally designed to display simple text documents on computer screens, with occasional graphic images thrown in as illustrations.

2. Audio :

• Sound is perhaps the most element of multimedia. It can provide the listening pleasure of music, the startling accent of special effects or the ambience of a mood-setting background.

3. Images :

•   Images whether represented analog or digital plays a vital role in a multimedia. It is expressed in the form of still picture, painting or a photograph taken through a digital camera.

 

4. Animation :

•   Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D Art work or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement.
• It is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in a number of ways.

5. Video :

•  Digital video has supplanted analog video as the method of choice for making video for multimedia use. Video in multimedia are used to portray real time moving pictures in a multimedia project.

Text in Multimedia:

•  Words and symbols in any form, spoken or written, are the most common system of communication.
•  They deliver the most widely understood meaning to the greatest number of people.
•   Most academic related text such as journals, e-magazines are available in the Web Browser readable form.

Fonts and Faces - Text:

•   A typeface is family of graphic characters that usually includes many type sizes and styles.
• A font is a collection of characters of a single size and style belonging to a particular typeface family.
•   Typical font styles are bold face and italic. Other style attributes such as underlining and outlining of characters, may be added at the users choice.
•   The size of a text is usually measured in points. One point is approximately 1/72 of an inch i.e. 0.0138.
• The size of a font does not exactly describe the height or width of its characters.
•   This is because the x-height (the height of lower case character x) of two fonts may differ.
• Typefaces of fonts can be described in many ways, but the most common characterization of a typeface is
•  serif
•  sans serif
•   The serif is the little decoration at the end of a letter stroke. Times, Times New Roman, Bookman are some fonts which comes under serif category.
•   Serif fonts are generally used for body of the text for better readability.
• Sans serif fonts are generally used for headings.
•  Arial, Optima, Verdana are some examples of sans serif font.

The following fonts shows a few categories of serif and sans serif fonts.

 

Selecting Text Fonts:

•  It is a very difficult process to choose the fonts to be used in a multimedia presentation. Following are a few guidelines which help to choose a font in a multimedia presentation.
•   As many number of type faces can be used in a single presentation, this concept of using many fonts in a single page is called ransom-note topography.
•   For small type, it is advisable to use the most legible font.
•   In large size headlines, the kerning (spacing between the letters) can be adjusted
•   In text blocks, the leading for the most pleasing line can be adjusted.
•   Drop caps and initial caps can be used to accent the words.
•   The different effects and colours of a font can be chosen in order to make the text look in a distinct manner.
• Anti aliased can be used to make a text look gentle and blended.
•   For special attention to the text the words can be wrapped onto a sphere or bent like a wave.
•   Meaningful words and phrases can be used for links and menu items.
•   In case of text links(anchors) on web pages the messages can be accented.

  The most important text in a web page such as menu can be put in the top 320 pixels.

 

Computer and Text:

Fonts

• Postscript fonts are a method of describing an image in terms of mathematical constructs (Bezier curves),
•   so it is used not only to describe the individual characters of a font but also to describe illustrations and whole pages of text.
•   postscript makes use of mathematical formula, it can be easily scaled bigger or smaller.
•   Apple and Microsoft announced a joint effort to develop a better and faster quadratic curves outline font methodology, called truetype.
•   In addition to printing smooth characters on printers, TrueType would draw characters to a low resolution (72 dpi or 96 dpi) monitor.

 

Character set and alphabets:

1. ASCII Character set

•   The American standard code for information interchange (ASCII) is the 7 bit character coding system most commonly used by computer systems in the United states and abroad.
•   ASCII assigns a number of value to 128 characters, including both lower and uppercase letters, punctuation marks, Arabic numbers and math symbols. 32 control characters are also included. These control characters are used for device control messages, such as carriage return, line feed, tab and form feed.

 

2. The Extended Character set

•   A byte which consists of 8 bits, is the most commonly used building block for computer processing. ASCII uses only 7 bits to code is 128 characters; the 8^th bit of the byte is unused.
•   This extra bit allows another 128 characters to be encoded before the byte is used up, and computer systems today use these extra 128 values for an extended character set.
•   The extended character set is commonly filled with ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard characters, including frequently used symbols.

3. Unicode

•   Unicode makes use of 16-bit architecture for multilingual text and character encoding.
•   Unicode uses about 65,000 characters from all known languages and alphabets in the world.
•   Several languages share a set of symbols that have a historically related derivation, the shared symbols of each language are unified into collections of symbols (Called scripts). A single script can work for tens or even hundreds of languages.

 

Font Editing and Design tools:

•   There are several software that can be used to create customised font. These tools help an multimedia developer to communicate his idea or the graphic feeling.
•   Using these software different typefaces can be created.
•   In some multimedia projects it may be required to create special characters. Using the
•   font editing tools it is possible to create a special symbols and use it in the entire text.
•   Following is the list of software that can be used for editing and creating fonts:
•  · Fontographer
•   · Fontmonger
•   · Cool 3D text