Word Processing, Image Editing

The specific part of maturita topic 20 (Science and technology), at B2 level: what word processors and image editors are used for and the most important terms you need to describe working with them.

Word processing

A word processor is a program for writing, editing and formatting text documents. The best known are Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages. People use them for letters, CVs, reports, school essays, contracts and books.

What you can do in a word processor

• Typing and editing – insert, delete, copy (Ctrl+C), cut (Ctrl+X), paste (Ctrl+V), undo (Ctrl+Z), find and replace.
• Character formatting – the font (typeface), font size, bold, italics, underlining, colour, superscript and subscript.
• Paragraph formatting – alignment (left, centred, right, justified), line spacing, indentation, bulleted and numbered lists.
• Styles – predefined formats for headings and body text. Using styles keeps the document consistent and lets the program create an automatic table of contents.
• Page layout – page size and orientation (portrait / landscape), margins, columns, page breaks, headers and footers, page numbers.
• Inserting objects – tables, pictures, charts, shapes, hyperlinks, footnotes, equations.
• Tools – spell checker and grammar checker, word count, track changes and comments for working with others, mail merge for sending one letter to many people.
• Saving and exporting – .docx, .odt, or PDF for sharing a final version that looks the same on every device.

Tips for a well-formatted document

Use styles instead of formatting every heading by hand; never use spaces or empty lines to move text – use indentation, tabs and page breaks; keep one or two fonts; and number pictures and tables with captions.

Image editing

An image editor is a program for creating and changing digital pictures. Professionals use Adobe Photoshop (raster graphics) and Adobe Illustrator (vector graphics); free alternatives are GIMP, Inkscape and Krita, and there are simple online tools such as Canva or Photopea. More and more editors also offer AI tools that remove backgrounds or generate parts of a picture.

Raster vs. vector graphics

Basic terms and operations

• Resolution – the number of pixels (e.g. 1920 × 1080) or the density for printing in DPI; 72–96 DPI is enough for screens, 300 DPI for print.
• Crop (cut off unwanted parts), resize, rotate and flip.
• Brightness, contrast, saturation, colour balance and retouching – removing spots, red eyes or unwanted objects (the clone tool, the healing brush).
• Layers – transparent “sheets” placed on top of each other, so that you can edit one part of the picture without changing the others; masks hide parts of a layer.
• Selection tools – the rectangle, lasso and magic wand.
• Filters and effects – blur, sharpen, black and white.
• Colour models – RGB (red, green, blue) for screens, CMYK for print.
• File formats – JPG for photos (small but lossy compression), PNG for graphics with transparency (lossless), GIF for simple animations, SVG for vector graphics on the web, and the program’s own format (PSD, XCF) to keep the layers.

Ethics

Edited photos can be misleading – think of retouched models in adverts or fake pictures created by AI. It is important to say when a picture has been changed, to respect copyright and licences such as Creative Commons, and not to use other people’s photos without permission.

Key vocabulary

Useful phrases

• To make a heading, you should use a style rather than…
• First you select the text, then you…
• The main difference between raster and vector graphics is that…
• I’d save it as a PNG because…
• I think AI tools will change image editing because…

Questions the examiner may ask

Try to answer each question in two or three sentences, then click on the hint to compare.