VIEWING PICTURES ON YOUR COMPUTER FROM A WEB SITE
INTERNET CONNECTIONS
How fast a web site page downloads onto your computer screen is largely a function of the speed of your internet connection. If you are using a dial up connection it will take some time to download pages and images from this web site because dial up connections are slow communicators of digital information. If you are using a DSL or other type of high speed connection, the web pages and images will download in seconds because these types of communicators are designed for digital technology. I recommend that you use a computer with some type of high speed internet connection to view and download any of the PDF files in the library.
OPENING PDF FILES
All of the library files are formatted in Adobe PDF file format. PDF files are created with Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Distiller programs. I selected the PDF format for three reasons. The first is that Adobe has excellent compression options which will allow for PDF files containing many images to be stored as smaller file sizes while retaining a large degree of image quality. The second is security. The small lock symbol that you see on the upper left side of a PDF file means that viewers can’t digitally extract selective information from a PDF file for other purposes. The third reason is that Adobe reader is a universal PDF file reader that is free and it works on all computer systems.
Sometimes you can get some slight distortion of images when opening a PDF file. This usually happens to the first image in the PDF file. The edges in some areas may seem to be jagged. This jagged effect can be caused by several things and it is easily corrected. The easy fix is to go to the next picture and then come back to the picture that showed some distortion. Another easy fix is to adjust the magnification. If the PDF file opens with a magnification of 75 percent adjust to 100 percent and then go back to 75 percent. Another reason may be the version of Adobe reader that you are using. If you have an early version of Adobe reader you may want to go to the Adobe web site and get a free download of the latest version. There is a link on the welcome page of this web site directly to Adobe in case you decide to upgrade or need Adobe reader.
MONITOR VIEWING
The appearance of the images that are displayed by your computer monitor are largely a function of the RAM capacity, graphics capability of your graphics card and the quality of your monitor. Sharp images are achieved with monitors with high resolution and computers with high quality graphics cards and a good amount of RAM memory. You can sometimes improve the image quality of your monitor by adjusting the monitor’s screen resolution so that a higher number of pixels are displayed.