Hardware

can produce a very professional-looking ship’s newspaper. The basic elements of desktop publishing are shown in figure 7-7. HARDWARE You will obviously need a microcomputer, keyboard, monitor and printer to form the nucleus of your desktop publishing system. Microcomputers used for desktop publishing need at least 512K of memory. Large jobs, such as designing a ship’s newspaper, require at least one megabyte of memory. The memory capacity of the microcomputer dictates the size of the pages you can design. Memory is also a factor in the overall speed of operation. A good high-resolution monitor and video card are system necessities. Your first choice should be a VGA (video graphics array) monitor. When paired with a VGA card, the VGA monitor can display up to 256 colors simultaneously. If your budget permits, get a full-page VGA monitor. This will allow you to look at an entire page at one time instead of continuously scrolling a page on a smaller monitor. You should also think about cheaper alternatives, such as a monochrome or enhanced color display monitor with a HGC (Hercules graphics card) or EGA (enhanced graphics adapter) card The printer is probably the most important element of your system. A laser printer should be your first choice for creating finished products. This compact machine produces near-typeset-quality print (usually at resolutions of 300 or 400 dots per inch) at a cost between $1,500 and $3,000. You should still consider getting a 24-pin dot-matrix printer, however. This printer is inexpensive and can be used to check fonts or create first drafts of pages. Think about adding a mouse to your system. A mouse is an input device that attaches to a serial port of the computer. Most mice come with two buttons. The left button performs primary commands, including highlighting and picking items off the screen. The right Figure 7-7.-Basic elements of desktop publishing. 7-15