Unit 30 - P2

Unit 30 – P2

Printed Materials

For the Kingswood Secondary Academy’s option and parents evening, they are going to need to have printed sheets of paper to give out to everyone. The file type Vector is probably the best type of programme to use for this because it has a lot of things that come with it to make it printer friendly. Vector has a lot of characteristics such as it can scale to any size of paper which will be useful because the school might want to use different kinds of paper to explain different types of things. It also doesn’t have a background which can be useful because it will print off in a better image because it won’t have to overcome anything that is in the background. Vector is also more printer friendly than Bitmap so the school would most likely want to use this programme to produce brochures and materials to the parents that come to the evenings. File types that are associated with Vector are EPS, AI and CDR. The file type AI is the best way to save something as because it doesn’t take up as much data, if you saved a few things under EPS then it would take up quite a lot of data, but in AI, it will be a lot smaller so that’s what the school would be better off using. AI is better than EPS and CDR because Ai is smaller in size; it is supported by many popular graphic software, paid version and free open source. Also Ai is the industry standard in design & printing. This doesn’t mean that CDR and EPS are bad though, CDR is a file extension for a vector graphics file used by Corel Draw, a popular graphics design program. Corel Paint Shop Pro and Adobe illustrator 9 and later can also open some CDR files. Whereas EPS requires PostScript language to draw its image. The school must have a specific software application to create an EPS file, such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and QuarkXpress. EPS file is often used when exchanging vector graphics (logos for example) that are only to be read but not edited by the receiver, such as sending the file to a print house. PDF is also a very important file that can be used for printing, in many ways it might be the best file to use. PDF stands for Portable Document Format, each PDF file captures a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it. Also if a file is saved under PDF, it can be reopen on any computer which is good for the school because some files can’t be open on computers such as Mac’s.  So Vector files are the best way for the school to print of brochures for their evenings.

Online materials

When the school wants to display graphical images on the Kingswood website, they will be better off using Bitmap because this programme is more used and is more effective for online things than what Vector is. When you go to a website and see a static image, it is almost certainly a bitmap. Bitmaps are made up of pixels—dots lined up next to each other in a grid that represent what you can see on the screen.  Bitmap used files such as JPEG and GIF, but use image compression systems that can significantly decrease their file size. For this reason, JPEG and GIF images are used on the Web, while BMP images are often used for printable images. This would be useful for the school to use because even though Bitmap takes up more storage and memory, it also makes it easier to store things online and make images look professional. Bitmap graphics also takes less processing power than what Vector graphics does, and it is better that Bitmap is made up of pixels because Vector is made up from lines equations and calculations, so this will make it easier for the school to process images online. When you zoom in on a bitmap image you can see the individual pixels that make up that image. Bitmap graphics can be edited by erasing or changing the colour of individual pixels using a program such as Adobe Photoshop which is a system that the school will have. Vector formats are not well supported on the web. The two most popular image formats used on the Web are GIF and JPEG which of course are Bitmap formats. Most vector images must first be converted into bitmaps images before they can be used on the Web. So for the school to post things onto the school website they should use Bitmap Files.