Real-Life Math
When you're a desktop publisher, you're always calculating. You
need to know how many words there are on a page and how much room to leave
for a picture, chart or graph.
You might have to send a finished document,
such as a report, to the printing department or an outside company. If that's
the case, you'll need to estimate the number of pages and copies the print
shop will need to make so they can reserve the right amount of time.
Desktop
publisher Tammy Eggert finds that her biggest mathematical concerns come with
tables. She needs to know how wide to make each column in a table. Once, she
worked on a single project that had 89 pages of tables!
"In desktop
publishing, my biggest concern is page layout," says Eggert. "I want to maximize
both height and width of the page as much as possible.
"Here's an example
of how I would determine column width: I have four columns that have small
amounts of information, and then I have a column for notes. The notes column
needs to be wider than the other four because there will be complete sentences
in that column."
Rather than have five columns of equal
width, Eggert determines what the widest piece of information in each column
will be.
Here's what Eggert has to work with:
- The width of the paper is 8.5 inches.
- There will be a one-inch margin on each side of the page.
- The table consists of five columns, which are called Bits, Types, Default,
Name and Notes.
- Three columns -- Bits, Types and Default -- will each take the same amount
of room. The biggest piece of information in these three columns, including
a space on each side, is 0.67 inches wide.
- In the Name column, the biggest piece of information, including a space
on the right, is 1.22 inches wide.
How wide will the last column (the Notes column) be?