When you get the mail this time of year, chances are you'll receive a few envelopes that bring a lot more joy than the usual bills and junk mail: holiday cards with photographs of friends and family. Sent to spread good wishes and share the year's highlights with loved ones, holiday photo cards are a welcomed tradition for many families. Thanks to standards, these printed greetings travel across the world through the month of December.
Put a sweater on your dog and bring your children to a rustic barn: its photoshoot time. Some families stage holiday picture sessions or get professional photographs taken, while others choose an array of their favorite snapshots taken over the course of the year. Either way, standards make it possible to capture these images for a personalized photo card. ISO 12232:2006, Photography -- Digital still cameras -- Determination of exposure index, ISO speed ratings, standard output sensitivity, and recommended exposure index was developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to provide guidelines for digital cameras. ISO 12232:2006 was developed by Technical Committee (TC) 42, Photography. The U.S. holds the secretariat of TC 42, and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has delegated these duties to The Society for Imaging Science and Technology. ANSI serves as the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) administrator to TC 42.
With your photo ready, you can create your own holiday card or upload your picture into one of many popular stationery websites to use one of their designs. When it's time to order your cards, standards are there to assure that the stationery company's printers deliver text that is crisp and colors that are bright. ASTM F1857-01(2011), Standard Terminology Relating to Ink Jet Printers and Images Made Therefrom, provides definitions related to business imaging hard copy printing. It was developed by ASTM International, an ANSI member and audited designator.
Stuffing and addressing the envelopes is your final step, but finding the contact information for extended family and past acquaintances can be a hassle. Keeping a holiday card address list in a spreadsheet on your computer is a simple solution for storing this information in a way that is easy to access and edit, year after year. INCITS - the International Committee for Information Technology Standards - is an ANSI member and accredited standards developer that has developed many standards that contribute to the functionality of spreadsheets, such as INCITS/ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (R2017), Information technology - Open Document Format for Office Applications(OpenDocument) v1.0, and INCITS/ISO/IEC 29500-1:2012[2013], Information technology - Document description and processing languages - Office Open XML File Formats - Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference.
Holidays cards are a sweet reminder that loved ones are thinking of you. Standards are there to help you check this holiday task off your list and bring joy to friends and family.