This is only for people who are interested in details about how I put this report together. For most folks, this is more than you probably want to know about this stuff.
Most of the pictures in the report were taken with an Olympus C-720 digital camera. This camera features an 8x optical zoom lens and 3.0 mega pixel resolution. I used the 1984 by 1488 pixel resolution mode. This allows for 173 pictures on a 128 MB memory card. I used two cards and took a little over 300 pictures.
I find the C-720 easy to use for most things, but the menu system is cumbersome for getting into the special settings. My biggest complaint about this camera is that the automatic focus system is a little slow and not so good in low light situations. On the other hand, the optics are quite good and I have enlarged images up to 16 by 20 inches with good results.
Some of the pictures in the report were scanned from post cards and brochures. I have developed a habit of collecting post cards while traveling. Many times the post cards have better pictures than I can take (for example interiors of buildings or ariel photos). Also, post cards help me remember the names of places I have visited and assist in spelling foreign names.
I use Paint Shop Pro 8 for editing all my graphic images. It makes it easy to adjust color balance and brightness, and to crop or resize the images. For the report, I used PSP to resize the images to 800 pixels wide to save file space. (A typical picture will go from 4,171 to 944 KB when resized from 1984 to 800 wide and saved in the tif format.) I save most images in the tif format rather than jpg. The tif format is common in publishing, while jpg is more common for internet use. The jpg format introduces compression that can reduce the quality of an image.
I have been using Adobe Frame Maker for many years to produce my technical books, so it is natural for me to use it for anything that is going to be more than a page or so, and that will involve inserting images or adding headers or footers. Frame Maker is fairly expensive, however, my opinion is that creating a similar report using something like Microsoft Word would be cruel and unusual punishment.
In Frame Maker, you create and assign paragraph styles to each paragraph. The paragraph styles can include font size, margins bullets, numbering, underlining, spacing, or even attached graphics. When you want to create a table of contents, you can tell the program which paragraph styles to include. The system then finds the page number for each item in the table of contents. If you edit the text and the editing causes a paragraph to move to a different page, the table of contents will be automatically fixed.
It is possible to attach graphics to paragraphs by adding frames and then inserting a reference to the desired graphic file (or files) in the frame. These frames can be anchored to the text. This means that you can go back and add or delete text, and the pictures move along with the changes. Also, by inserting the graphic images by reference, rather than including them in the report file, I can go back and change an image in Paint Shop Pro, and re-save the file. When I return to Frame Maker the edited image is automatically there.
Once you have your paragraph styles designed, you just type away. Part of the paragraph design determines what happens when you hit the enter key to start a new paragraph. In my case, I have the system automatically switch from Heading 1 to body when the enter key is pressed. No more hitting the enter key more than once to add extra space between paragraphs. The paragraph design takes care of this automatically. If you want to change the style of a paragraph, you simply place the cursor in a paragraph and select the desired style from a list.
Each Frame Maker page is based on a Master Page that you define. The master pages include the lines and little flags found at the top of each page. In my case, I have different master pages for odd and even pages. Since I designed this report for two sided printing, I made the page numbers on my master pages always appear at the outside lower corner of the page. I designed the even page header to carry the report title, and I designed the odd page header to use something called a running header . In my case, the system uses the most recent paragraph that I set as Heading 1 as the header for odd pages. (Heading 1 is also the paragraph used for the Table of Contents.)
Color copies of the report were printed on an Oki 5150 color laser printer. Color laser printers have come down in price quite a bit lately and I got the Oki for $600. It is much faster than my old HP ink jet, and does not choke like the ink jet on double sided copies.
Since double sided document always end on a even page, I hate to leave it blank. In this document, I simply added a couple of nice pictures to fill out the report.
Well, I warned you that this would be more than you wanted to know. But, I hope some of you might find this interesting.
To create the web pages, an htm file was saved from Frame Maker. Microsoft Front Page was then used to edit the final web version.
