Printable Column Paper: Fill & Download for Free

As Basile Starynkevitch says, there is nothing C-specific about the choice. The usual purpose of expressing integer values in Hex or Octal is when the integer contains specific bits or patterns of bits which are significant in some way. Usually, you would want the reader to be able to easily ascertain the particular value of the bit(s) in question. Since the mapping of Hex or Octal digits to specific bits is completely consistent for all values of integers, it is preferred over the conventional decimal notation, which does not have that property. Even the fact that a value is expressed in a radix which has a power-of-two base triggers the reader to the fact that bit patterns within the value are probably more significant than the value itself.The expression of colors as hexadecimal, for instance, commonly allows the reader to break out the separate RGB(and maybe alpha) components as individual parts of the expression. Doing a read-modify-write of some hardware register in which only a subset of the bits is modified can be much more clearly expressed in hex or octal. Printing a block of data on a screen or on paper can be much more readable in hex or octal because every value can be expressed in the same number of digits, resulting in cleaner alignment of columns of data. If you are working in a very low-level language like assembler, it is almost trivial to generate printable ASCII strings representing integer data in hex. The same data as printable decimal characters is comparatively complex to generate.

What would be examples of when you would want to change the default margins in Microsoft Word?Here are four Word templates that I have permanently pinned to my Windows taskbar for easy access — and some of the reasons for why each one uses different values than Word’s default margin settings.Recipes.dotx has ½ inch margins on top, bottom and right; and a 2 inch margin on the right. When I find a recipe online, I can copy the content (plus the URL and credits) to an empty page from this template and paste it as plain text. I have the template’s styles set up with keyboard shortcuts to make it easy to format typical recipe “parts” consistently to my preferred fonts and paragraph layout: title, source, ingredient list, steps, notes, etc. Since any printed recipe we decide to keep will end up in a folder in a kitchen drawer, no binding margin is needed — but the wide right margin leaves enough space to add notes. As can be seen in the left screen shot below, the narrow margins give me additional room for content — including pictures with text wrapping — and makes it easier to fit everything on a single page.NarrowMargins.dotx has ½ inch margins all around. This maximizes the printable area available, and lets me fit more content on a page that can still remain readable by setting it with a two-column layout (Layout > Columns). As the right screen shot above shows, I can have 2 columns of 3½ inches with ½ inch spacing between them on a letter-sized sheet (8½ × 11 inches). As with the recipes, the styles are optimized for easy reading of content being pasted in from other sources. The title and intro paragraphs in the example above were set as single-column to span the full width; the main content is in 2-column. When I need to document examples of code where there are often many short lines, but occasional long ones, I can change the orientation to landscape to have 2 wider columns of 4¾ inches.OurLetterhead.dotx has a 1½ inch top margin; left and right margins of 1¼ inch; and a bottom margin of 1 inch. This fits the pre-printed letterhead we use.HouseNotes.dotx is designed for double-sided printing, with top, bottom, inside and outside margins of ¾ inch plus a 2 inch gutter. Choosing mirror margins changes left and right to inside and outside, with the “gutter” amount included on the inside of every page. As can be seen in the screen shot of 4 pages below, this gives me lots of white space for notes on the inside margins — including typeset ones where the style includes frame settings to automatically place the paragraph within a frame relative to the inside margin of whatever page it happens to fall on.As it happens, all of the above use US Letter-sized paper (8½ × 11 inches). Different margins suit different page dimensions, and you should plan to change them if you change the paper size in Page Setup’s Paper tab. For example, dimensions for “A4” paper will be 8.27×5.83 inches (or 21×14.8 cm), so the default 1 inch (or 2.54 cm) margins would likely be excessive.If you are preparing content to be published as a book, be sure to research the publisher’s recommended dimensions for paper and margins. As an example, a book I am working on at the moment will be printed by KDP (Amazon) using a PDF I’ll create with Word. Following KDP’s online guidelines, I have it set with a 6×9 inch trim size, with top & bottom margins of 0.75 inch; inside & outside margins of 0.5 inch; with mirrored margins using a gutter of 0.25 inches. When I use Word to “print” the PDF, it will have those same dimensions.Tip: Each of the 4 templates described above is “pinned” to the Word group in my Windows 10 taskbar. This way, I can just right-click the Word icon and choose the template I want to use. A new blank Word document then opens with the template selected. Pinned items stay at the top of the pop-up list; a set of recently-opened Word documents is listed below them.To add a template to your taskbar, open the template document in Word (i.e. File > Open and then browse to the template to open it and not a new document based on it). When the template is open in Word, right-click the Word icon in the taskbar to display the pinned and recent files. The open template’s name will be at the top of the “Recent” list, so click on the “Pin to this list” icon to the right of the name to add it to your pinned list.

I have to answer this, since I hate to say it but the three answers given so far offer explanations that are more misleading than anything (and at worse are a Mac vs Windows beat up).Let’s go back to early telecommunications equipment and origins of the control key. These were typewriters that could send what was typed across a wire. Sholes did intend the typewriter to communicate letters to elsewhere, even if it were only 12″ away. His first effort looked like a piano keyboard: Christopher Latham Sholes | American inventor). Typewriters had all the letters in upper and lower case and numbers, but to effect next line, the typist operated the lever at the right end of the carriage (note that word) to push the carriage back and advance the paper one line. This operation was known as ‘carriage return’, ‘line feed’. These were not visible marks on the paper, so were control functions.With telecommunications, to get a remote terminal to do this, carriage return (cr) and linefeed (lf) were added as transmitted characters to not print, but ‘control’ the terminal at the remote end. In the character sets for such equipment several other control characters were added like start of text (stx), end of text (etx), end of transmission (EOT). You can see a bunch of them here:http://ascii-table.com/ebcdic-table.phpIn ASCII the first 32 (hex 0–1F) were control characters, and in EBCDIC the first 64 (0–3F). You could type these directly by pressing the control key with the character. The control key effectively subtracted hex 40 from the key pressed, so ctrl-a became the control character SOH. You can see the correspondence of all the codes in the ASCII codes presented in a column.ASCII character codes and html, octal, hex and decimal chart conversionTeleprinter - WikipediaReturn is also an anachronism – really it is used on computer keyboards as enter and sometimes this key has been labelled ‘enter’. When you next press the ‘return’ key remember it is called return because of carriage return of the carriage on an old mechanical typewriter.So with that history, we can now answer the question. Early computer keyboards followed telecommunications equipment by having a control key so operators (they were more operators rather than users then) could also enter control characters. Only a few characters were assigned keys on the keyboard, like tab, delete, and return – the latter of which you could equivalently use ctrl-m, ctrl-j.So the control key is a historic artefact for outdated equipment, like the QWERTY keyboard itself that was designed that way to stop keys jamming.So Apple comes out with the original Macintosh in 1984, with some ideas that Xerox GAVE them from Xerox PARC (because Xerox weren’t interested) and Apple came up with some ideas of their own, like the menu commands. Apple wanted command equivalents from they keyboard, but these weren’t in anyway equivalent to control characters. So Apple added a command key with the clover leaf character, which later became the apple key, but then back to clover leaf. They positioned the command key for speed so typists did not have to move hand from letter keys and so a hand could stretch from the command key to a letter key.While keyboard designs are constrained by the universal acceptance of the anachronistic QWERTY layout, Apple was free to think about the rest of the keyboard. Why would they need control characters – the Macintosh was not related to or intended to be related to old telecommunications equipment, so such junk could be ditched.Instead a command key, and another key, the option key. That key had a more typographic function to get characters that were not common on keyboards, such as ç, é, ñ, etc. So where the control key results in invisible non-printable characters, the option key results in printable alternative characters. (This is a clear function, rather than the vague, what does the ‘alt’ key do on a PC?) This was because Macintosh was conceived as a machine for typography, not just for text processing the limited ASCII telecommunications set.The Macintosh was thus a clean start with a somewhat clean slate, and not so interested in preserving past anachronisms. This has frequently annoyed technical people who have fixed ideas on how things are done, even when they are anachronistic and should be replaced because they are not relevant anymore.So the IBM PC had these kinds of things on the keyboard (while a nice keyboard to the touch, it was really irritatingly noisy, maybe it was so a boss could tell whether an operator was doing her job or her nails). Oh, yes on that point – you see old computing equipment was operated by operators – the Macintosh was intended for the user. That is a BIG difference.When Windows was developed, it did not do a big rethink just “let’s put this system together without too much thinking”, nothing radical. Just adapt what we have rather than take an integrated approach. Then “how can we get the functionality of Apple’s command key – oh yes, we’ll hijack the control key, even though it is in the wrong place so operator has to move their hand”.There is a third player in this, Unix from Bell Labs, a big telecommunications company. Unix made heavy use of ASCII control characters. Ctrl-c (etx) and Ctrl-d (EOT) were hijacked to interrupt a process running on the terminal. Macintosh did not want processes to be easily terminated in that way by mistake, so chose the rather harder command-option-escape, so you knew what you were doing (Windows adopted ctrl-alt-del to shutdown.)Since then, everything has been connected to the network, and MacOS is Unix based, so technical people can use command line in Unix which requires some use of control characters. So really, the control key used for that should be of little interest for users, but Apple has given it some meaning as a modifier key to access pop-up menus and other extended functions like dictionary-define a word that you control-click.So really the control key is just a vestige of the past. Apple has tried to get rid of it, but sometimes even Apple is constrained by backward compatibility.AddendumOne person here has a problem with understanding history and wants to perpetuate the myth that Apple ‘stole’ the GUI from Xerox and Microsoft just did the same. That is a lie started by Gates, who put around that Microsoft arrived the scene to steal a TV only to find out that Apple had already broken in and stolen the TV.Apple did not steal from XeroxXerox clearly gave the technology to Apple, because Xerox management on the East Coast did not want to commercialise what PARC in Silicon Valley (Palo Alto Research Centre) had done. Even though the people at PARC were somewhat resistant, Xerox ordered them to show Apple and Steve Jobs. They had already shown others including IBM and Tektronix, who like Xerox management just did not get it and failed to see the potential. When Jobs and his team walked in, they more-or-less danced around the room saying this was the way of the future. This was in 1979. Several key PARC people including Larry Tesler and Alan Kay moved to Apple.Apple were already working in this space. The mouse itself was not invented at Xerox PARC, but by Doug Englebart at Stanford in the early 1960s. Apple employed people like Jef Raskin who was doing a graphical system and also had the ideas in his head. Raskin primed Jobs to go to PARC and see what he was getting at. When the Apple team arrived at PARC, the PARC people were expecting jean-clad hackers, but instead they were respectable computer scientists who Jobs had employed.Once the Macintosh had progressed, Apple were looking for partners for applications software to build up a developer community. Hence Microsoft and some others were brought in in 1981, two years after the Mac project was commenced (and that was after the Lisa), so the ideas were well advanced. Note that Apple had a very successful product in the Apple II that was raking in money, so to go for these new GUI ideas was not that obvious that it would work, that it could be done for a low-enough cost, or that the market would accept it. On whether it would work – it was pushing the limits of technology and PARC had been doing that for the whole of the 1970s. For cost, the Xerox Alto was around $100,000, even the Lisa was way too expensive at $10,000, and Macintosh had to be done for $2,000. And would the market accept it? Xerox management, IBM, and Tektronix all couldn’t see it. The point here is Apple was taking considerable risk.In interactions between Microsoft and Apple technical people the Microsoft people were pushing for details they did not need to know. Gates eventually conned Apple into giving him Macintosh source code. All this went into Windows 1.0, which was a hurried and shoddy product compared to the polished Macintosh that took half a decade to develop between 1979 and 1984 (or maybe longer because Apple also demonstrated the Lisa to Xerox PARC in a technology exchange, and Raskin was already developing ideas for the Mac in 1979).Cringely – Steve Jobs visit to Xerox PARCLarry Tesler explains Jobs visitTo summarise – Apple and Xerox PARC cooperatively shared technology and entered into a legitimate agreement to exchange ideas. Microsoft on the other hand took advantage of the close developer relationship with Apple and STOLE the ideas and technology from Apple. You could say that Apple was a bit naive, but they did not expect to be stabbed in the back the way they were. Microsoft had also ridden on Apple’s back to get to where it was since it made a lot of money out of Apple II BASIC and then the Z80 CP/M card for the Apple II.People who stick to the story of Apple stole from Xerox and Microsoft did the same are spreading misinformation.The Control Key (original question revisited)Now the second part I need to summarise is the who control key saga. As I said in the answer above:Christopher Latham Sholes invented the typewriter. It was originally like a piano keyboard, but later he did the qwerty layout. This was made into a product by Remington (in rather the same way that Apple built the PARC ideas).Typewriters keyboards were closely related to printable characters. To advance to the next line was done by a lever to return the carriage (now we have a return key, for carriage return). At some stage the shift modifier key was introduced to swap from lower case to upper case.With electronic typewriters there was no carriage return lever, instead a carriage return key was added.Eventually electronic keyboards were used for data communications, for example in telex machines, where the operator would punch a paper tape, complete with function codes for carriage return and line feed. These and other non-printable characters became control codes in various character sets, eventually ASCII and EBCDIC. To put extended control codes in a data stream, a control key was added.The control key was also put on early computer keyboards for data communications. The control key was a modifier that subtracted 0x60 from the key code (lower case letter code) to produce the invisible control character code.The Macintosh was not envisaged as a networking machine, rather as a personal computer (Jobs had missed the PARC networking research). There was no need for a control key, but there was a concession that exclusively using menu commands was slow for some functions, so keyboard equivalent shortcuts were provided for faster operation. The modifier key for this was the command key (known as the clover leaf key, or for a short time the Apple key). The function of this was clearly differentiated from the control modifier key, which had quite a different function. In Unix, control-c and control-d were used to interrupt the currently running task.Later, the Macintosh was used by communications programs to connect to other systems, including Unix (the company I worked for was doing communications applications for Apple in another developer relationship with Apple, like Microsoft – we had one of the first Macintoshes outside of Apple in this country, although we had a couple of Lisas beforehand). For such applications, a control key to do the original control key function was needed and added by Apple.Apple had keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy, and paste. Cut: command-x (scissors); copy: command c (for copy); paste: command-v (for down arrow), and the undo became command-z. These were all the bottom four keys on the keyboard. Apple invented the use for these now-standard shortcuts. Apple did NOT invent cut, copy, paste. That was Larry Tesler while at Xerox (when he died recently, the reports made this clear that he invented this technology which most people use every day). Larry Tesler is also one of the nicest guys in the computing industry that I have ever met. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2212877.2212896Now Microsoft copied the Apple keyboard shortcuts, but on non-rethought keyboards (like Apple’s) had to use an existing key. What did they use? The control key. This was not an improvement, in fact, being further left to do keyboard shortcuts, the typist must move the hand to hit control. This slows down operation.But using control key as something different than control functions means control functions are usurped. Thus when using terminal programs, like Microsoft’s own Command Prompt, and other emulators (Putty, Teraterm, Hyperterminal, etc), the control key is now ambiguous – is control-c copy or a Unix-style break? This means the control key is inconsistent. Apple uses its keys entirely consistently. What about the Windows alt key? Sometimes it operates like Apple option key to modify a printable character (é, ü, ©, ®, etc), but sometimes alt does extended command functions. On a Mac keyboard, I know what everything does. On a Windows keyboard, mysterious functionality. Microsoft loves complexity. Apple tries to tame complexity – and that is the task of good computer designers, whether in hardware, or programming languages.Thus Apple is closer to the industry standard than Microsoft. Apple’s design and keys are more consistent and do not exhibit the need for exceptions like Microsoft’s use of the control key. Apple’s modifier key functionality is an orthogonal design – Microsoft’s is not.Right Mouse and Contextual Menus (the fictional anecdote)The third discussion was around the Microsoft’s right mouse button. The Microsoft mouse first appeared in 1983. Note they can claim the mouse was a well-known device – Doug Englebart had demonstrated it to all and sundry in 1968 in the Mother of All Demonstrations:The Mother of All Demos - WikipediaEnglebart was in fact not pleased that his invention had just been ripped off by Xerox PARC. At least Apple paid him $100,000 for a perpetual licence, which no other company did. Microsoft while insisting on being paid by everyone is a very poor payer. Look at what they have done to typefaces – instead of paying for licences for Helvetica, etc, they have developed their own rip-off fonts like Ariel (the worst, next to Comic Sans), Verdana, etc. Microsoft have wrecked the typeface space. Typographers hate Ariel (it just changes a few pixels on Helvetica).Microsoft got their first Macintosh later in 1981. Seeing the mouse, they could easily say that Apple only has one button, so we’ll make a mouse with two buttons to make it bigger and better (and more tasteless). But Apple had paired down the PARC mouse of three buttons to one button. Unlike PARC, Apple did not have pop-up context menus brought up by the middle or right button, but instead put menus at the top of the screen (by Fitts’s Law). These menus did not come from PARC. Apple designed the Macintosh specifically integrated with a one-button mouse. There was NO NEED for a second mouse button. There were no pop-up contextual menus on the Macintosh – it was carefully designed and thought out and had taken them years to do it, along with extensive user testing to work out how ordinary people would use the machine and find it the easiest.Microsoft’s later systems were rushed to market to catch up Windows 1.0 pre-announced in late 1983 to beat Apple, although not released until 1985 – and then it was junk, a reasonable Windows that was anything near the Macintosh did not appear until 1990 with Windows 3.0 (but still lacking Macintosh polish and integration of hardware and software). This was in true IBM fashion of pre-announcing a product, mostly vapourware to starve the competition, like IBM had done with their STRETCH computer vapourware to irreparably damage CDC with their famous 6600. Microsoft learnt the tricks well from IBM (see Richard DeLamarter’s ‘Big Blue: IBM’s Use and Abuse of Power). Computer vendors still abuse these tricks and power. Apple again developed the iPhone over at least five years. Google buys Android, based on Linux to quickly compete with Apple. Apple’s version of Unix is tailored for iPhone and iPad.Back to the two-button mouse. It was claimed in another answer anecdotally that in 1984 when seeing a Macintosh that the salesman kept pressing a key on the keyboard simultaneously with the mouse key to do the same things as the second button on the Microsoft mouse. This cannot have occurred. The right-mouse button is used to bring up a contextual menu. (Apple used the term pop-up menu for a box indicating a small number of discrete values to choose from, like months). The first macintoshes did not have contextual menus. There is no mention of contextual menus in the 1987 Apple Human Interface Guidelines, nor the 1992 online version. There was absolutely NO REASON FOR A RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON on Macintosh, neither even for a modifier key to emulate any right button.Now there was a modifier-click function to extend the selection – shift-click extended a selection including all in between, a continuous selection and command-click for non-contiguous selection extension. These are still common today, and Windows also needs such modifier-click combinations to extend selections. I can only guess this is what the Macintosh sales guy was doing. But doing modifier-click to do the same as the Microsoft right-mouse button, is rubbish – there was no such functionality, and no need for such functionality. Note that Windows in 1984 didn’t even exist. Thus the anecdote about the Mac sales guy and the two-button mouse is at best a fiction – it was just not possible. It is not verifiable, it is only in the head of the guy who related it. The Mac sales guy isn’t around to either verify or deny it. Anecdotes of that kind are worse than useless.Apple later introduced contextual menus. And yes to do that you control-click. (Human Interface Guidelines ) This is not at all onerous (unless you use the mouse left handed, which I have not seen people do). When the right hand leaves the keyboard to operate the mouse, the left hand remains on the keyboard, ready to press the control (or other modifier keys) if needed. On the trackpad you can bring up the contextual menu by a two-fingered press, so no need for the keyboard at all. Apple carefully considers all its gestures from human to computer. So again there is still no need for a two button mouse. However, Apple did introduce its magic mouse, which can be configured for a two-button mouse if applications require it. However, mostly Apple insists developers conform to Apple’s interface guidelines. This is not “our way or the highway” as some make out about Apple, but an effort to maintain consistency across all applications. You do not get that consistency on Windows or even Android – it is not about restrictiveness but about consistency.For the small and not-so-frequent operation of bringing up a contextual menu, assigning special mouse button for it is overkill. It is in no way a superior feature of Windows when the equivalent functionality is so easily provided in another way. Perhaps the second mouse on Windows can be used in other ways, but at best that would be non-standard and at worst, inconsistent (like the control key).That indeed makes it easier for users which is one of Apple’s main aims. Others are just about grabbing market share.People who appreciate these qualities in Apple products are not just ‘mindless fanbois’ who have ‘drunk the cool-aid’. They are people who find Apple’s products better, whether it is by intuition or by study of human interface factors as I have done over – well decades now.This has been a very long addendum to my original answer to try to address the issues in an exchange that had descended to personal slurs, which I was trying to avoid. I hope it has cleared up those three issues (Apple did not steal from Xerox, but Microsoft did steal from Apple, Microsoft’s inconsistent use of the control key vs. Apple’s industry standard and consistent use, and third, the non-essential use of a second mouse button to bring up a contextual menu, which didn’t even exist on the Macintosh until the 1990s at the earliest proving that the 1984 anecdote was a fiction).