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How To - Preparing Titles and Details
About Titles
Titles are not required for any of our services but
can provide some benefits you may like to take advantage of.
Titles can be used to provide On-Screen captions for
"Computer Slideshows".
Titles can also be used to give meaningful names to the
picture files on your "Basic Scanning Disks".
Descriptive names can be used to quickly locate specific
pictures by searching the disk directory file name or partial
file names.
All recent Windows variations support file names up to 250
characters. Macintosh support for long file names is
much more recent and, as yet, is not well
supported in system utilities nor Macintosh software.
However our supported CD directory formats limit file names
to 30 characters for Macintosh and 64 characters for
Windows systems. Although longer titles can be
truncated for use as filenames on your "Basic Scanning
Disks" it is best to try to work within these
limitations.
About Details
Details can only be used with our "Computer
Slideshow" service.
Details provide for a date and a longer description of
each image. The title and details for each picture can
be "popped up" during a "Computer
Slideshow" by selecting the "DETAILS" button
on the slideshow menu.
Providing Titles and
Details
If your order includes several slideshows you
should prepare one document per slideshow.
Up to four "items" can be supplied for each
picture. These are:
- Picture number,
- Picture Title,
- Picture Date and
- Picture Description.
If you are only interested in the titles facilities
just code number and title.
There are several ways that you can prepare documents to
provide us with title and detail information about
your pictures.
Paper
The first method is a simple list on paper (preferably
typed).
This option is more expensive that electronic submission
and the difference is reflected in in the costs generated by
our Cost
Estimator.
Word 2000
Our preferred method for receiving titles and details is
as a Microsoft Word-2000 document.
If you use Word 2000 (or a compatible Word version)
download this
document to prepare your titles and/or
details. The
document contains a simple Word table with one table row for
each picture. Simply tab from field to field filling
in the data you go.
Save the text file where you can
find it later calling it something useful eg:
"Holiday Slideshow Pics.doc".
Excel or Works Spreadsheet
Simply enter the data into a worksheet with one row for
each picture, using up to four columns for the four
items that can be entered for each.
Save the text file where you can
find it later calling it something useful eg:
"Holiday Slideshow Pics.xls".
Delimited Text
Using a simple text editor (eg Notepad) type in the
data for each picture separating the items with a TILDE
character (~) and pressing the return key at the end
of each set of items.
Save the text file where you can
find it later calling it something useful eg:
"Holiday Slideshow Pics.txt".
Entry Form
The following form can be used for entering small batches
of titles and details. To do this follow these steps:
- For each picture type the
information and press the ENTER button .
- After each group of pictures
press the FINISH button.
- After a few seconds a new window
should open with all the data laid out in an odd looking
format.
- Start the simple text editing
program that comes with your computer (eg for windows
this is NOTEPAD)
- Select everything in the window
that popped up in step 3 and paste it into the text
editor.
- Save the text file where you can
find it later calling it something useful eg:
"Holiday Slideshow Pics 1 to
20.txt". etc
- Shut down the window that popped
up in step 3.
- Return to this window.
- If you have more pictures to
describe, press the RESET button and then
set the picture number to the next picture in the batch
you are working on. Continue at point one. If you
do not press RESET the new data will be added to
that data already entered. This is not recommended.
We recommend small batches (perhaps
up to 30 per batch) because this facility is not
particularly robust and does it have any inbuilt backup to
safeguard the data you have entered in the instance of
power/system failure. You may find you are comfortable
entering larger batches.
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