Explaining some of the Technical Stuff in laymans terms

OK, so you've got the disk and before you break open the tamper evident seal, you have all this technical jargon you don't really understand. Well let's see if we can explain it in simpler terms.

Firstly, your computer needs to have certain things on it for this CD to work properly. When designing a CD like this, I needed to find a way to let you browse through the designs quickly and easily. It had to be simple to use and something that most people would be able to use without learning something new.

That's why I chose to make it work just like the Internet. Most computer users these days do have access to the Internet and are comfortable with how to click on links and images to move around and browse through different pages.

So, the CD was designed like a mini, stand-alone website. You don't need to actually connect to the Internet to look at it - everything is there on the disk itself. When a computer comes across a file designed like this, it understands it and automatically opens it up using the same program that you normally use to look at the Internet. For the majority of people, this program is Microsoft Internet Explorer, but some people might use another program such as Firefox or Netscape. The point is, you don't actually need to worry about that, as the computer will work it out for you.

So far, so good. Now when it comes to printing a design, Internet programs are not very good. They end up printing out funny, missing bits off or going onto two pages. So to actually get the printing working fine (which after all is the whole point), the printable pages have been designed to use another program, Adobe Reader.

Adobe Reader is a free program that lets anyone view and print files that were created using Adobe Acrobat. You will also see it referred to as Acrobat Reader or even Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Because Acrobat is very widely used, Adobe who make it, are always improving it and bringing out updated versions. At the time of writing this, Adobe Reader 8 is the latest version. For us crafters, Adobe 8 has one massive, brilliant improvement over its earlier versions - the ability to format text.

On our Damask Delights and Butterfly Bliss CD, there are several places where you can put your own text in - greetings and inserts. The place where you type your text is called a form by Adobe, as it's original purpose was to allow people to fill in forms online (tax returns for example). The Inland Revenue was never really that bothered about letting people change the colour or the font they were using, but that's exactly what us crafters wanted and finally, we can do it.

Our first two CDs, Filigree Fusion and Fantasy Floral, were released in October 2006, when the latest version of Adobe Reader was version 7, so these do not have the text feature enabled. If enough people demand it, I will bring out an upgraded version.

So, are you still with me? To summarise, you need to have some kind of Internet program to browse through the designs on the disk, but don't need an active Internet connection.

Plus you need to have Adobe Reader to view and print the individual page layouts - version 7 for Filigree Fusion and Fantasy Floral and version 8 for Damask Delights and Butterfly Bliss.

Now, for the technical bit.

Adobe Reader 8 is pretty new which means that it will only work on fairly up to date computers. In technical terms - Windows XP with Service Pack 2. To understand this in laymans terms, here's a some info about Windows updates.

What you may not know is that PCs need to be regularly updated. Microsoft are always updating and tweaking Windows XP and these "updates" are made available to you free of charge.

You may have noticed sometimes that when you switch your computer on, you get a message that says Updates are ready for your computer. Click here to install these updates. If you have an internet connection, you can click on this message and Windows XP quietly downloads these updates. The reasons they do updates like this are varied and usually highly technical. Most of the time, it won't affect you or your computer if you don't bother downloading these updates, though it is always recommended that you do.

However, Adobe 8 will only work properly on PCs that have had certain specific updates installed. How do you know which ones? That's where Service Pack 2 comes into play. Service Pack 2 (SP2) is a shorthand way to describe a whole bundle of updates.

This means that other companies (such as Adobe) can then produce their own programs (such as Adobe Reader), knowing that they can work to a fixed technical specification and their users won't have to worry about updates at all.

So how do you know if you have Service Pack 2 installed. Well I have covered this as a separate article and you can read all about it here.

Once you have checked that you DO have SP2, you might want to find out exactly how to install Adobe Reader 8 and again, I have written a separate article on exactly how to do that - click here to find out how.