Making Things with a Computer

People use computers to make three kinds of things more than any other:

• Documents: pages of text, often with pictures and tables, to print or to read on a screen. A letter, a notice, a report, a poster, a certificate. An app for making documents is called a word processor.
• Slideshows, or presentations: a set of slides, pages shown one after another on a screen or a projector while someone speaks. An app for making them is called a presentation app.
• Pictures: photos, drawings and charts. A phone’s camera and its photo editor make and change photos; a drawing app makes drawings; a spreadsheet makes charts, as you saw in Unit 6.

These apps work in much the same way, whoever makes them. You type text, then choose how it looks: its font (the shape of the letters), its size, bold or italic, its color, and its alignment (whether the lines start at the left, end at the right, or sit in the middle). You add pictures and tables. And you save your work as a file, with a good name, in the right folder, as you learned in Unit 2.

The parts of a page

Most pages you will make, from a school report to a poster, have the same few parts.

• The heading says what the page is about. It is bigger and bolder than everything else, so it is read first.
• The body text is the main writing, in sentences and paragraphs.
• A picture shows what words can’t: what Nyatapola looks like is faster to see than to read.
• A caption is a short line under a picture saying what it shows. Readers look at a picture and its caption before they read the body text, so a caption is worth writing well.
• A credit says who made the picture, and under what license you may use it. You will learn about these later in this unit.
• The margins are the empty space round the edge. They make a page easier to read, and they stop a printer from cutting off words at the edge.

Design means deciding how something looks and works, so that it does its job. A poster’s job is to be noticed and read, often from across a room, by people who are walking past. Three rules do most of the work.

1. Contrast: the letters must stand out from what is behind them. Dark letters on light paper, or light letters on dark paper. Pale yellow on white, or dark blue on black, almost disappears.
2. Size: the most important thing is the biggest. The eye goes to the biggest words first, so make them the words that matter most (“Science Fair”), then the next most important (when and where), then the details. If every line is the same size, nothing tells the reader where to start.
3. Alignment: things line up. Lines of text that start at the same edge let the eye run straight down the page. Lines scattered about, some in the middle and some at the sides, make the eye jump around, hunting for the next one.

Two more habits help every page:

• Space. Leave empty space round things and between groups. Space is not waste: it tells the reader which lines belong together.
• Few fonts. One font is often enough, two at most: perhaps one for headings and one for everything else. Use bold for a word or two that matter, not for whole paragraphs.

A good picture makes a page clearer, faster. A bad one only fills space. Before you put a picture in, check four things:

• It shows what you mean. A report about the Bagmati River needs the Bagmati River, not just any river.
• It is big enough to see. A tiny photo with a lot in it shows nothing.
• It has a caption saying what it shows, and a credit if someone else made it.
• It keeps its shape. Every photo has a width and a height. Pull only its side, and the app stretches or squeezes it, so that people look thin or fat and round things look like eggs. To make a picture fit a space without changing its shape, crop it: cut away part of it, keeping what matters.

In Unit 2 you learned to type Nepali in Unicode. Everything in this unit works in Nepali too: a heading, body text, a picture with a caption, and the three rules. But a few things are special to Nepali.

• Choose a font that has Devanagari. Many fonts have only Latin letters, for English. If you choose one of those for Nepali text, the app quietly uses another font for the Nepali, or shows empty boxes (☐☐☐) where the letters should be. Use a font made for Devanagari, or one made for both scripts.
• Give the lines room. Devanagari letters have marks above the line (the vowel signs in के and कै, the dot of चन्द्रविन्दु) and below it (कु, कू, कृ). Packed close, the marks of one line touch the next. Nepali text reads better a little bigger than English, with more space between the lines.
• Mixing languages. A page in Nepali often has an English word or a number in it. Pick a font that has both scripts, so that both look as if they belong together. For numbers, use either Nepali digits (१२३) or the usual 123, and keep to the same kind all through the page.
• Check spelling yourself. Not every app can check Nepali spelling. When you aren’t sure of a word, look it up in a Nepali dictionary.
• Send a PDF. A PDF carries its fonts with it, so a Nepali document sent as a PDF looks the same on any phone. Never make Nepali documents in Preeti: as you saw in Unit 2, a phone without the font shows only English letters.

A school notice in Nepal, a सूचना, follows a pattern that people know well: the school’s name at the top, then सूचना in big letters, the date (मिति) on the right, the message, and at the bottom on the right, who it is from. Following the pattern helps people find what they need. The three rules still decide whether it is easy to read.

A slideshow is shown while someone talks. The speaker is the talk; the slides only help. Slides help when they show something the audience can take in at a glance while listening: a picture, a few words, a number. They get in the way when they are the whole talk written out, because people then try to read and listen at once, and do neither well.

So for slides:

• One idea per slide. If you have three things to say, use three slides.
• Few words. A title and a few short lines, not sentences. What you would say goes in your talk, not on the slide.
• Big text. Slides are seen from far away. A common rule of thumb: nothing smaller than about 24 points (the size used in slide apps), and titles much bigger.
• A picture instead of a paragraph, whenever a picture can show it.
• The three rules of contrast, size and alignment, all the more because a projector in a bright classroom makes colors pale.

Sita is making a poster about Rara Lake. She searches the internet, finds a beautiful photo of the lake, and puts it on her poster. Is that all right?

Someone took that photo. They walked to the lake, waited for the light, and chose where to stand. The photo is their work, just as a song is the singer’s and songwriter’s, a story is its writer’s, and an app is the work of its programmers.

Copyright

Copyright is the right of the person who made something to decide who may copy it, share it, change it or sell it. It covers photos, drawings, music, films, writing, and computer programs too. In Nepal, as in almost every country, copyright starts by itself the moment a work is made: the maker doesn’t need to register it or write © on it. So a photo on a website, even with no © anywhere, still belongs to its maker.

That means:

• Found on the internet doesn’t mean free to use. Being able to see a photo, or to download it, doesn’t give you the right to use it.
• To use someone’s work, you need permission: the owner says yes, or the work comes with a license, a written permission that says what everyone may do with it.
• Copyright lasts a long time, but not forever. In Nepal it lasts, for most works, for the maker’s whole life and 50 years after they die. For a photo it is shorter: 25 years from when it was taken. After that the work is in the public domain: it belongs to everyone, and anyone may use it.

There are a few small exceptions. Nepal’s copyright law lets you copy small parts of others’ work for your own study, quote a little of it, and use small parts in class for teaching, as long as you name the source and the maker. But anything you publish, put online, or sell (a poster on a public wall, a post on social media, a video, a calendar) needs permission, or a license that gives it.

Credit

To give credit, also called attribution, is to say clearly who made something you use: “Photo: Maya Tamang.” Credit is honest. It tells your readers which part is yours and which is someone else’s, and where to find the original.

Passing off someone else’s work as your own is called plagiarism. Copying a paragraph from a website into your project as if you wrote it is plagiarism, even if the website allows copying. In school it counts as cheating; at work it can cost a job.

Why it matters

It is worth knowing why these rules exist, not only what they are:

• It is fair. A photographer in Pokhara, a singer in Kathmandu, a programmer who makes an app: many people earn their living from what they make. If everyone copied it freely, they couldn’t, and fewer good things would be made.
• It is honest. Credit lets people know whose ideas and work they are looking at, so they can thank, trust or check the right person.
• It helps readers. A credit with a link lets a reader find the original, see it bigger, and learn more.
• You would want the same. One day a photo, a song or a program of yours may be copied. You would want your name on it, and a say in how it is used.
• It is the law. Using others’ work without permission can lead to a takedown, a fine or a court case.

The same goes for computer programs. Copying a paid app or game without paying, or someone’s program without permission, breaks copyright. Many programmers share their programs freely under licenses that say what others may do with them, the same idea as the Creative Commons licenses below.

Asking every owner for permission is slow, and many people are happy to share their work as long as they get credit. In 2001, in the United States, a group led by the lawyer Lawrence Lessig set up Creative Commons, and in December 2002 it published a set of free licenses that anyone can put on their work. With a Creative Commons license (CC), the owner still owns the work, but tells everyone in advance: you may use this, as long as you follow these conditions.

Each license is made from four conditions:

Short name	Means	You must…
BY	Attribution	give credit: say who made it, and give the license
SA	ShareAlike	share anything you make from it under the same license
NC	NonCommercial	not use it to make money
ND	NoDerivatives	not share changed versions: share it only as it is

Every Creative Commons license includes BY. Joined together, the conditions make six licenses, from the most open to the strictest:

• CC BY: use it for anything, and change it, with credit.
• CC BY-SA: the same, and what you make from it must be shared under CC BY-SA too.
• CC BY-NC: anything except making money, with credit.
• CC BY-NC-SA: not for money, with credit, and share alike.
• CC BY-ND: use it for anything, with credit, but only unchanged.
• CC BY-NC-ND: only unchanged, not for money, with credit.

There is also CC0 (“CC zero”), with which an owner gives up all their rights: the work becomes like public domain, free for anything, with no conditions at all. A number after a license, such as CC BY 4.0, is its version; 4.0 is the newest.

This book’s photos are a real example

Look under any photo in this book. You will see a line like this one, under the photo of Nyatapola in Unit 3 and in Figure 7.1:

Photo: Göran Höglund (Kartläsarn), CC BY 2.0

Göran Höglund took that photo in Bhaktapur in October 2011 and shared it with the license CC BY 2.0. He put it on Flickr, a photo-sharing website. From there it was copied to Wikimedia Commons, a free library of pictures, and that is where we found it. CC BY lets anyone use the photo for anything, even in a book, as long as they give credit. So we did not need to ask him: the license is his permission, given in advance. In return, we keep his condition: his name and the license are under the photo, and both are links, to the photo’s page and to the license.

Our other photos follow the same rules, with different licenses:

Photo in this book	License	What it lets us do
Nyatapola (Unit 3)	CC BY 2.0	use it, with credit
The IBM 1401 computer (Unit 1)	CC BY-SA 3.0	use and change it, with credit, sharing changes alike
The ATM (Unit 1)	CC0	anything; we give credit anyway, as a thank-you
Ada Lovelace’s portrait (Unit 1)	public domain	anything: painted in the 1800s, its copyright ended long ago

Giving credit the right way

A good credit answers four questions:

1. What is it? The title, if it has one, or “Photo”, “Drawing”, “Music”.
2. Who made it? The author’s name, as they give it.
3. Where is it from? The website, with a link if your work is on a screen.
4. Which license? The license’s short name, such as CC BY 4.0, with a link to it if you can.

So: Photo: Göran Höglund (Kartläsarn), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Put it under the picture, beside it, or in a list of credits at the end of a report or on the last slide.

Your own work

Your photos, drawings, stories and programs are yours too: you own their copyright from the moment you make them. You may choose to share them under a Creative Commons license, so that others can use them with credit. In Grade 8 you will choose a license for your own photos and videos.