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Ink

An ink is a liquid containing various pigments and/or dyes used for coloring a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing and/or writing with a pen, brush or quill. Thicker inks, in paste form, are used extensively in letterpress and lithographic printing.

Ink is a complex medium consisting of comprising solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, fluorescers, and other materials. The components of inks serve many purposes; the ink’s carrier, colorants, and other additives are used to control flow, thickness, and appearance of the ink when dry.

[edit] Types of ink

Line of a Fountain pen, 50-times magnified

Early varieties include Egyptian ink, various natural dyes made from metals, the husk or outer covering of beans or seeds, and sea creatures like the cuttlefish (known as sepia). India ink is black and originated in Asia. Iron gall ink was used by many of the old masters for drawing. Walnut ink is erroneously thought to have also been used by old masters, however, there is no proof of this. Walnut inks, if they were used, would have faded fairly quickly and would therefore be unsuitable.

[edit] Pigmented inks

Pigmented inks contain other agents that ensure adhesion of the pigment to the surface and prevent it from being removed by mechanical abrasion. These materials are typically referred to as resins (in solvent-based inks) or binding agents (in water-based inks).

Because pigmented inks stay on the surface of paper, less ink is needed to create the same intensity of color as with dye-based inks. Pigmented inks also tend to be more resistant to washing out. For this reason these inks are frequently recommended for applications where erasure is undesirable. Gel inks are particularly resistant to erasure and frequently bear recommendations from forgery experts.

The particle size of the pigment is very important for the ability to diffuse in the solution inks. Qualities such as hue, saturation, and brightness or lightness are inherent in the ink, and vary depending on the source and type of pigment.

[edit] Dyes in inks

Dye-based inks are generally much stronger than pigment-based inks and can produce much more color of a given density per unit of mass.

Liquid is one of the principal states of matter. A liquid is a fluid that has the particles loose and can freely form a distinct surface at the boundaries of its bulk material. The surface is a free surface where the liquid is not constrained by a container.^[1]

Characteristics

A liquid's shape is confined to, not determined by, the container it fills. That is to say, liquid particles (normally molecules or clusters of molecules) are free to move about the volume, but they form a discrete surface that may not necessarily be the same as the vessel. The same cannot be said about a gas; it can also be considered a fluid, but it must conform to the shape of the container entirely.

At a temperature below the boiling point, a liquid will evaporate until, if in a closed container, the concentration of the vapors belonging to the liquid reach an equilibrium partial pressure in the gas. Therefore no liquid can exist permanently in a complete vacuum. The surface of the liquid behaves as an elastic membrane in which surface tension appears, allowing the formation of drops and bubbles. Capillarity is another consequence of surface tension. Only liquids can display immiscibility. The most familiar mixture of two immiscible liquids in everyday life is the vegetable oil and water in Italian salad dressing. A familiar set of miscible liquids is water and alcohol. Only liquids display wetting properties. Liquids at their respective boiling point change to gases (except when superheating occurs), and at their freezing points, change to solids (except when supercooling occurs). Even below the boiling point liquid evaporates on the surface. Objects immersed in liquids are subject to the phenomenon of buoyancy, which is also observed in other fluids, but is especially strong in liquids due to their high density. Liquid components in a mixture can often be separated from one another via fractional distillation.

The volume of a quantity of liquid is fixed by its temperature and pressure.

Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or Pandora fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site or Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose your (say) Google Docs data in another tab?

If so, Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your WebApp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, many other goodies.

Fluid includes Tabbed Browsing, built-in Userscripting (aka Greasemonkey), URL pattern matching for browsing whitelists and blacklists, bookmarks, auto-software updates via the Sparkle Update framework, custom SSB icons, a JavaScript API for showing Dock badges, Growl notifications, and Dock menu items, and more.

The Fluid Thumbnail Plug-in allows you to browse the web with CoverFlow or iPhoto-like thumbnail previews for links on the current page. Watch the screencast in the sidebar on the right to see the Thumbnail Plug-in in action. How does the Thumbnail Plug-in know how to find the links on the current page from which to make the thumbnails? Simple... Use CSS selectors to select links or images for a given URL pattern (like *google.com*). Add CoverFlow support for your own site with a simple CSS selector!

How does Fluid work?

Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a little tiny window where you specify the URL of a WebApp you'd like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Provide an application name, specify a Location and an Icon, click 'Create' and you'll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you've just created.

Use Fluid to run YouTube, GTalk, Flickr, Basecamp, Delicious, .Mac webmail, or any other WebApp as a separate Mac desktop application.

(Shown here: Fluid, Campfire, Flickr, Fluther, Gmail, FriendFeed, github, Google Reader, Yahoo! Messenger, Muxtape, Tumblr, YouTube)

Anytime you click a link to another site in an SSB, the link is opened in your system default web browser, keeping your SSB dedicated to the original site you've specified.