Text, Number and Symbols

Character sets
Every word is made up of symbols
or characters. When you press a
key on a keyboard, a number is
generated that represents the
symbol for that key.
This is called a character code. A
complete collection of characters
is a character set.
ASCII(American Standard Code for Information
Interchange)
● There are two systems commonly used for character (text, numbers and
symbols) representation.

● The ASCII code system (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
was set up in 1963 for use in communication systems and computer systems.

● The ASCII character set is a 7-bit set of codes that allows (0 to 127 in denary or
00 to 7F in hexadecimal) that represent the letters, numbers and characters
found on a standard keyboard
ASCII(American Standard Code for Information
Interchange)
This table shows some examples of letters represented using the ASCII character
set:
ASCII Table
ASCII ASCII(American Standard Code for Information
Interchange)
Consider the uppercase and lowercase codes in binary of characters. For example,

The above examples show that the sixth bit changes from 1 to 0 when comparing
the lowercase and uppercase of a character.
Extended ASCII
ASCII uses 8-bit codes (0 to 255 in denary or 0 to FF in hexadecimal).

This gives another 128 codes to allow for characters in non-English alphabets and
for some graphical characters to be included:
Disadvantages of ASCII
● ASCII code has a number of disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that it
does not represent characters in non-Western languages, for example Chinese
characters.

● For this reason, different methods of coding have been developed over the
years.

● One coding system is called Unicode.

Unicode
● Unicode can represent all languages of the world, thus supporting many
operating systems, search engines and internet browsers used globally.

● There is overlap with standard ASCII code, since the first 128 (English)
characters are the same, but Unicode can support several thousand different
characters in total.

● The Unicode consortium was set up in 1991. Version 1.0 was published with five
goals; these were to:
Unicode
● create a universal standard that covered all languages and all writing systems

● produce a more efficient coding system than ASCII

● adopt uniform encoding where each character is encoded as 16-bit or 32-bit

code
● create unambiguous encoding where each 16-bit and 32-bit value always
represents the same character

● reserve part of the code for private use to enable a user to assign codes for
their own characters and symbols (useful for Chinese and Japanese character
sets, for example).
Sample of
Unicode
characters
Representation of Sound
● The sound we hear is also analogue but, as we know,
computers work digitally and can only process binary.

● We need to convert the analogue sound into binary

for a computer to be able to process it. Sound is
recorded using a microphone and converted to binary
by software.

● Sound is recorded at set timed intervals; this process

is known as sampling.
Representation of Sound
● Soundwaves are vibrations in the
air. The human ear senses these
vibrations and interprets them as
sound.

● Each sound wave has a

frequency, wavelength and
amplitude. The amplitude
specifies the loudness of the
sound.
Representation of Sound

● This means that sound is analogue. Computers

cannot work with analogue data, so sound waves need to be sampled in order to
be stored in a computer.

● Sampling means measuring the amplitude of the sound

wave. This is done using an analogue to digital converter (ADC).
Sound
● The samples are then converted into binary. If the set timed intervals are closer
together, the soundtrack will be higher in quality. Simply with more samples the
sound can be more accurately captured.

● Sample sizes are measured in hertz. 1 hertz equals 1 sample per second.

● So how is sampling used to record a sound clip?

Sound
● the amplitude of the sound wave is first determined at set time intervals (the
sampling rate)

● this gives an approximate representation of the sound wave each sample of the
sound wave is then encoded as a series of binary digits.

● each sample of the sound wave is then encoded as a series of binary digits.

Using a higher sampling rate or larger resolution will result in a more faithful
representation of the original sound source. However, the higher the sampling
rate and/or sampling resolution, the greater the file size.
Sound
The benefits and drawbacks of using a larger sampling resolution when
recording sound.

CDs have a 16-bit sampling resolution and a 44.1kHz sample rate – that is 44100
samples every second. This gives high-quality sound reproduction.
Representation of Images
Bitmap images are made up of pixels (picture elements); an image is made up
of a two-dimensional matrix of pixels. Pixels can take different shapes such as:
Representation of Images
Each pixel can be represented as a binary number, and so a bitmap image is
stored in a computer as a series of binary numbers, so that:

● a black and white image only requires 1 bit per pixel – this means that each pixel
can be one of two colours, corresponding to either 1 or 0.

● if each pixel is represented by 2 bits, then each pixel can be one of four colours
(22 = 4), corresponding to 00, 01, 10, or 11

● if each pixel is represented by 3 bits then each pixel can be one of eight colours
(23 = 8), corresponding to 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111.
Representation of Images
Increasing colour depth also increases the size of the file when storing an image.

Image resolution refers to the number of pixels that make up an image; for
example, an image could contain 4096 × 3072 pixels (12 582 912 pixels in total).

Photographs with a lower resolution have less detail than those with a higher
resolution.
Representation of Images
The main drawback of using high resolution images is the increase in file size.
As the number of pixels used to represent the image is increased, the size of
the file will also increase.
Representation of Images

Image ‘A’ has the highest resolution and ‘E’ has the lowest resolution. ‘E’ has
become pixelated (‘fuzzy’). This is because there are fewer pixels in ‘E’ to
represent the image
resolution.