Desktop Publishi ng is great

• You get nice clear fonts.• The ability to edit the text very e

asily.• It is very easy to include materia

l from other sources.• - You do it all yourself you don’t

have to trust and pay a typist.

Risks of DesktopPublishing

• Content is more important th an image

• - - Copy and paste syndrome•Diagrams•Graphs• Other pitfalls

Content is more important than image

• Time spent on presentation is time not spen t doing the work or getting the content right.

• Words in a nice font are not necessarily mor e meaningful than scruffy handwritten word

s.• Pretty diagrams can give an illusion of being

useful.• Be perfectionist about the content, not the i

mage.• Examiners examine on content.

- - Copy and paste s yndrome I

• It is too easy to copy and exist ing piece of text or diagram an

d modify it a bit to make a ne w one.

• This is bad for much the same reasons that it is bad in progra

mming.

- - Copy and paste s yndrome II• It make reports much too long.

• - It makes reports harder to read it is h arder to find the important bits.

• - It makes reports harder to write there is more to check to make sure you got i

t right.• Mistakes get propagated.• You can copy in things which shouldn’t

be there.

Diagrams I A picture is only worth a

thousand words if• There are a thousand w

ords to say.• It is a good picture.

Diagrams II Be aware of:

• Spending vast amounts of time drawi ng complex diagrams when you would be better off working on the content.

• - Content free diagrams which could be - replaced by a few well chosen words.

• Overly complex/confusing diagrams b adly related to the text.

Graphs They are good for visualising numb ers but graphs are very inexact.

• To draw meaningful conclusions, y ou usually need the numbers, too.

• To draw quantitative conclusions, you must use the actual numbers.

Other pitfalls•Spelling.

• It is very tempting to overuse fonts . This is very irritating , especially bolding things you want to stress. Don’t do it.

• Overuse of parentheses (as well as [ other sorts of] bracketing1 - and das

- hes ) should be avoided.

Overuse of animation techniques

• Computer• Keyboard• Mouse• Monitor• Main board• Sound card• Printer

• Hard disk• CD ROM drive• Floppy disk drive• ZIP drive• Plotter• Scanner• Digitizer