1 Acceptable File Formats for Essays & Reports

When asked to write essays or reports or to answer questions, you should prepare a document with your answer, using your favorite text editor or word processor, and then use the “Submit” button on the assignment page to submit that file(s).

Remember that the whole purpose of preparing such a document is communication. Anything that gets in the way of communication, including careless organization, missing information, unreadable graphics, or non-portable document formats, is therefore likely to be penalized.

Unless otherwise instructed, your document must be in one of the following formats:

• plain ASCII text, saved as a .txt file.

  In some instances, this will not be acceptable. For example, if you are told to prepare a report that is to include graphs or other images, you obviously cannot submit in plain ASCII text.

• Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), saved as a .pdf file.

  Most word processors allow you to generate PDF directly. Exactly how this is done will depend on the program you are using and hte operating system that you use it on. Sometimes this is done via an “export” item in a menu; sometimes it is done by printing to a special printer that writes PDF out to a file.

  Make sure that you know how to do this on your chosen machine/software platform well before the assignment is due.

Do not assume that I will accept other document formats unless you have checked with me first! You will lose 10% of the assignment value for submitting in an unapproved format, 20% if you force me to switch to a different machine that has software capable of reading your document, and 100% if I cannot find such a machine.

1.1 Graphics and Drawings

In assignments that ask you to prepare charts or diagrams, you should use the appropriate drawing tools to prepare your graphics. With many such tools, you will then need to export the final diagram into a portable graphics format.

Do not simply take a screenshot of the diagram within the editor portion of your drawing tool. Such screenshots invariably include extraneous and distracting elements associated with the editing process.

These should then be copied-and-pasted or imported, as appropriate, into a word processing document. Do not submit multiple separate graphics files.

An important part of working with graphics is the distinction between “raster” and “vector” graphics formats.

• Raster graphics formats are oriented towards producing colored pixels and subtly shaded areas, useful in photographs and artistic drawings. When images in these formats are resized or even just viewed on a device with a different resolution than the one in which it was drawn, the colors of adjacent pixels may be mixed (aliased) without noticeable degradation.

  Most of the diagrams that you are likely to produce in this class are line drawings mixed with text. Raster formats do not work well with these. When these are resized, the same mixing process results in fuzzy lines or may cause lines to disappear entirely.

  Common raster formats include bmp, gif, jpeg, and png. Use these with photograph-like images, not with line drawings. (If you absolutely must use one of these for line drawings, jpeg is probably the worst choice for this purpose.)

• Vector graphics formats are oriented towards the drawing of lines and geometric figures (including text). When images in these formats are resized, the lines are stretched by simply moving the coordinates of the end-points. Vector formats work very well with line drawings, remaining sharp and clear no matter how many times they are resized.

  They can be awkward with photographs or other images requiring subtle shading, but most vector formats will allow you to embed “boxes” of a common raster formats within a larger vector-format drawing.

  Common vector formats include pdf, ps, eps, svg, wmf, and emf. Use these with line drawings.

  It can be a bit harder to find graphics programs that produce vector formats, and some word processors will let you paste vector images into a document but will not display it to you until you print.

  • A tip: if you have a Windows drawing program that lets you move lines and shapes after placing them on the screen, it probably is using a vector format (wmf or emf) internally. In that case, if you copy-and-paste directly from your drawing program into your word processor, the graphic is probably being copied as a .wmf or .emf image even if the program does not allow you to save in those formats directly to a file.