What does Alignment mean in word processing terms?

Answer 1

It depends whether you mean the hard drive or the RAM.

When discussing RAM and programming code, alignment refers to being on certain-sized boundaries. That is important so the CPU won't have to access the data or instructions in multiple steps. If the data or code straddles a memory boundary, then the CPU will have to piece it together from at at least two attempts. In assembly, the EVEN keyword is used to tell the assembler to make sure the next address is an even boundary. If it isn't, it places the NOP instruction there to pad it so it will be even. Thus the jump target or data location is at an even address.

When discussing a hard drive, alignment can refer to at least three different things.

Alignment in terms of low-level formatting (something that users don't have to do anymore since modern hard drives all come formatted this way) refers to laying all the track and sector boundaries and highly technical details such as head skewing, sector skewing, and the interleave factor. You could sometimes return an type older drive to a more reliable state by doing a new low-level format. The alignment of the mechanics would drift, so creating new boundaries would make up for the drifting.

File alignment is how files are placed on a drive. If a file is split into different pieces, it is considered fragmented. So defragmentation aligns the files to be accessed more efficiently.

Partition alignment refers to whether the partitions on a disk start at an even 4K boundary for reasons similar to the memory location boundaries. The reason this is important is that older hard drives used 512 byte sectors, and newer hard drives use 4K sectors. However, operating systems still expect 512 byte sectors, and the AFD (advanced format drives) drives can handle that. However, due to how Microsoft originally did things, the partitions start 1 sector off, requiring the drive to make two reads or two writes. So if every sector is skewed by one then you can see how that would slow performance. So there are several workarounds for this. One way to do it is with software. You would run a program to shift entire partitions by a sector. It may cause some incompatibilities with some partition managers, but the OS can access it fine. Another way is for the hard drive to detect this condition and use some tricks to hide this situation and compensate for it.

Answer 2

mean where in page to align textbox or graphic, for example on centar of page or on top or bottom...