Macintosh Bible, 8th Edition, The

Text Is a Medium, Too

Text may not seem eye-poppingly exciting, and the hype that surrounds multimedia often ignores it—but text is a very useful medium, capable of conveying complex information in a flexible and compact format. For example, this entire chapter, which is more than 14,000 words long, can fit in just a few hundred kilobytes (in contrast, the illustrations take up several megabytes). Text is also searchable, indexable, and often the only medium that can make your point effectively. Few multimedia packages, however, treat text with the respect it deserves, often reducing the text to a graphic image or providing only the most primitive of text-entry and -editing tools.

When preparing text for multimedia use, it is best to stick with ...