function of software that enables users to change the appearance of a document by specifying the font, point size, and style of any character in the document, as well as the overall layout of text and graphical elements in the document

used to tailor documents to the specific needs of the user

ex. changing the font type from Verdana to Ariel in Microsoft Word 

professionally designed empty documents that can be adapted to specific user needs

provide a standard format that can be individualized by the user and the information he enters into the template

ex. Microsoft Publisher has templates for making brochures, certificates, newspapers, etc

built-in component of a word processor or a separate program that compares words in a document with words in a disk-based dictionary and flags words not found in the dictionary

batch mode: checking all the words at once

interactive mode: checking one word at a time

ex: infermation would be flagged in a document as a misspelled word

component of word processing software that analyzes each word in context, checking for content errors, common grammatical errors, and stylistic problems

ensures that the syntax of the words in the document make sense in the language that the document is being written in

ex. Ben and me went to Boston would be flagged by the grammar check because the subject I does not agree with the verb went

American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a code that represents characters as 8-bit codes

since computers process information in 0's and 1's, each code of 256 codes is a different combination of the code; these codes allow any binary computer to work with 26 letters (upper and lower case), 10 digits, and special characters

ex. 01001001 01010100 01000111 01010011 is ITGS

65,000-character set for making letters, digits, and special characters fit in to the computer's binary circuitry

ASCII only accounts for 256 characters, but some languages have more than that; Unicode facilitates multilingual computing

ex. Hebrew, Chinese, and Greek use Unicode  

portable document format that allows documents of all types to be stored, viewed, or modified on any Windows or Macintosh computer, making it possible for many organizations to reduce paper flow

format is platform independent and it can be read just as if a hard copy was right in front of the user

ex. Adobe provides PDF software

words appearing in print

ex. everything you are reading on this flashcard

rich text format is a document language used for exchanging text between different word processors and text-processing applications

platform independent and allows documents to be compatible with different types of word processors

ex. {\rtf1\ansi{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss Helvetica;}\f0\pard
This is some {\b bold} text.\par

}

would be read by a program as

This is some bold text.