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Word Processing before Computers

It wasn't long ago that people used typewriters for presenting written information in a clear, formal way. Typewriters were, originally, mechanical devices that printed the characters that you selected directly onto a sheet of paper. To type the letter 'a' onto your paper you would press (with some force) the 'A' key on the keyboard. This would cause a small hammer (with an 'a' cut into it) to push a piece of ink-soaked ribbon against the paper. This made the print of the letter on the paper.

Typewriters have been used for over a hundred years because they were cheaper and quicker than printing presses and many of them were portable (could be carried around). However, they had a number of disadvantages:

If you made a mistake when you were typing you had three choices: strike out the text (~~like this~~) by typing over the top; paint out the mistake using correction fluid; or start again.
As you had to press the keys firmly, typing at speed was hard work - and noisy.
Changing the ribbon was messy - as you got ink all over your hands.
You were stuck with one font - no range of typefaces or sizes

This meant that the computer-based Word Processor has virtually taken over from the typewriter for simple, text handling.

Fonts and Typefaces

Now that we all have access to word processing and desktop publishing software we have to be aware of the way our writing looks on the printed page. There are two key terms do describe the way the letters in your piece of text turn out:

Typeface: this describes the letter style that is used. Arial and Helvetica are examples of typefaces. They have clear, rounded shapes to the letters with no serifs (twiddly bits) on the ends of the characters.

Font: this describes the characters of a certain size of a particular typeface. So 12pt Arial is an example of a font.

It is very easy to confuse the terms Font and Typeface because they refer to similar things.

WYSIWYG

One of the real advantages of using a word-processing application over a typewriter is that you can look at the layout of the text on the page before it is printed. So, you can check to see if the headings are clear, the text isn't all squashed up at one end of the page, or that it just looks nice.

This feature is often called WYSIWYG (pronounced 'wizzy wig') and it stands for What You See Is What You Get. What it means is that what you see on the screen is what you are going to get when you print it out (or something close to it).

Very generally, desktop publishing applications give you a WYSIWYG representation as you are writing your text - and word processors only give you the WYSIWYG version when you select Print Preview (or a similar command).