Certainly this procedure is complicated—and you might want to do a dry run before you try beating a 5 o'clock deadline—but the capability of transfering a computer file cross-country in seconds can be crucial to a business. The fact that it can be done with free software and a casual $10/month E-mail connection is astounding. Play around and learn to do this. In the future, printers may commonly accept submissions by E-mail or by direct transfer over telephone lines. Imagine not having to figure out how to keep your camera-ready copy dry on a rainy day or having to rush across town minutes before your deadline!
STEP 4. Image enhancing and/or color separation
One of the great advantages of having a graphic in a computer file is that you can use free software (or shareware) to play around with the image. Cropping, rotating, streching, zooming, and so on are all common. In addition, you can convert color to black and white or greyscale, enhance the image, make halftones or color separations, and even play with the spatial frequency spectrum if you want. (Color separations are the four images needed by printers—separate ones for Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and Black ink).
STEP 5. Importing or embedding in a word processing or desktop publishing program
Once you are happy with the picture you import it as a graphic into your DTP or word processing program. If your program reads the format the picture is in, this is easy. If not, you will need to get free software that converts from the format you have to the one you need. This process is very experimental. I've found that I have better results converting from an obscure format to a standard and common format like GIF or TIFF before converting to a proprietary target format. This is even true if the software says it reads the obscure format directly.
STEP 6. Printing on a laser printer or other equipment
If a graphic is not solely intended for display on a (color) monitor, like a slide presentation, it must be printed out. And there it is. Your picture in print.
<Chapter 8> What to Do When You Only Have E-mail
The very first thing to do is to get information on getting a better Internet connection! But barring that, there are many reasons that you might need to know workarounds that only require E-mail: you might be stuck somewhere (like work) where there is no Internet access, or you could be borrowing access from a friend. Since Internetworking is about communicating with others, in many ways this is the most important chapter in this course.
First we consider methods for