Ascii Text As Their Native File Format example essay topic

binary file a file that contains codes which are not part of the ASCII character set. A binary file can contain any type of information that can be represented by an 8 bit byte with a possible 256 values. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) a standard code used for representing information on computer systems and networks. It uses the printing and non-printing characters that can be generated by the keyboard. Since 7 bits are available to represent each character it is possible to represent a total of 128 different characters.

Bit-mapped graphics or Paint images This kind of image is treated as a set of pixels each of which has some colour. Drawing and editing affect the pixels directly. When the image is filed, the information for each pixel is stored. A set of pixels may form a shape such as a circle, but its just a series of dots to the computer. You can erase the dots and draw a new circle, There are actually quite a few types of bit-mapped systems. These include: Bit mapped PICT, JPEG (Joint Photo Exchange Group) and GIF (Compuserve Graphic Interchange Format).

These are all important to you as a multimedia and Internet author. Most paint programs create PICT. Ald us Super Paint creates files in this format (as well as in Object-Oriented format.) Most internet files must be sent in GIF or JPEG format. We " ll often use Adobe Photoshop to work with the final draft of these file. Click here for more detail about GIF and JPEG. JPEG and GIF File Format You will usually use the "Save for Web... ". function in Photoshop to choose GIF or JPEG compression.

Always use JPEG for continuous tone images such as scanned images or digital photos. For solid color, line art or logos GIF is usually preferable. Typically, a compressed file is 1/10 the original size without compression. This depends on the "quality" setting done when compressing.

Typically, try to avoid extremes. If asked with a scale of possibilities, use something with quality (above "average"), but avoid the highest quality setting. Users normally can't detect the difference between high and maximum quality unless both their equipment and vision are very good. GIF is heavily used for certain special effects. In particular, it allows for animation. JPEG does not have this capability.

An animated GIF file contains a sequence of frames with timing information. Another interesting feature in GIF format that helps work around the limitation of 256 colors is the capability of using an adaptive palatte. This is a system in which a palatte is built (with up to 256 colors) to best simulate a particular graphic. Then the palatte definition is embedded in the graphic file itself. For example, suppose your graphic is all yellows and b rows. The adaptive palatte will have no blues or greens but only a variety of yellows and browns taken from all the colors available in the hardware of the computer on which you create the file.

This is available in the Save for Web... routine inside Photoshop. MP 3 (. mp 3) MPEG Layer, digital audio compression format achieving smaller file sizes by eliminating sounds the human ear can't hear or doesn't easily pick up. For more, see our MP 3 codec section. mp 3 pro - audio codec developed by Thomson Multimedia that attempts to achieve the same audio quality in smaller file sizes than MP 3# WAV (. wav) Uncompressed audio format developed by IBM and Microsoft. Became standard audio file used on PCs.

What is AVI? AVI stands for Audio Video Interleave. It is a special case of the RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format). AVI is defined by Microsoft. AVI is the most common format for audio / video data on the PC. AVI is an example of a de facto (by fact) standard.

AVI CODEC formats There are numerous AVI file formats other than the DV Types 1 and 2 formats discussed earlier. All of these other formats involve the use of COmpressor / DE Compressors (CODECs) to read and write the AVI file. All invariably compress the video by reducing frame size from the standard 720 x 480 to 240 x 160 or smaller, by reducing the number of frames per second (giving jerky movements), and by washing out color, contrast and intensity. The resulting file size may be attractive, but the quality is usually quite poor. Cine Pac and Index are common used CODECs. You can view the CODECs installed on your system by going to the Control Panel, activate Sounds and Multimedia, click the Hardware tab, select video Codecs, click properties and select the Properties tab (Windows 2000).

One thing to watch for when using CODECs to encode a video that you intend to send to someone else is that the video can only be viewed if they have the same CODEC installed on their system. ASCII text ( . txt) This is the most basic file format used to transfer data on the Internet. The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text format tends to be the most portable format because it is supported by almost all applications on most platforms. ASCII, or plain, text files contain data made up of ASCII characters: each byte in the file contains one character that conforms to the standard ASCII character set.

Text editors such as Windows Notepad and DOS Editor generate ASCII text as their native file format. Examples of ASCII text files include program source code, batch macros and scripts. ASCII text is the 'lowest common denominator' in file formats and is almost universally supported across applications and platforms. Very limited in terms of formatting and multimedia support.

Problems can occur in rendering the text when transferring files between computers which use different coded character sets. For example, the US ASCII (the 7-bit version) character set is limited to 128 representations of characters, whereas more than 250 characters are needed to correctly represent European languages based on the Roman alphabet. Modern character sets (e.g. Latin-1, Unicode) define extensions to US ASCII specifying values above 127 for representing special Latin characters and also characters from non-Latin writing systems such as Cyrillic and Hebrew. DBF files These are the files which actually contain the data. They are in standard dBase format and should be compatible with other programs which use DBF files. A DBF file contains information concerning the way the data within it is structured.

Each record within the database consists of certain fields. Each field has a name, a length and is of a certain type - character, numeric, logical, date or memo. The DBF file begins with a description of the record structure and this information is followed by the records themselves. Although the DBF file is a binary file and the information concerning the record structure is stored in binary format, the actual data in the records consists entirely of normal ASCII characters. Thus even for numeric fields data values are stored as sequences of digits rather than using the binary format computers use to store numbers for their internal use. Dates are simply stored as a sequence of digits, with e.g. 19940310 representing March 10th, 1994.

Memo fields contain the digits of the record number at which the associated memo entry begins in the memo (DBT) file. In order to access the data held within DBF files programs such as QB need to know the correct name, type and length of the fields within each record. Hypermedia The Hypermedia Format is a base topic for topics describing a defined way of coding information for storage or transfer of hypermedia (usually used in a Hypermedia System). Hypermedia System is an application which uses associative relationships amongst information contained within multiple media data for the purpose of facilitating access to, and manipulation of, the information encapsulated by the data..