Microsoft® Word 2010 In Depth

11. Working with Drawings, WordArt, and Clip Art

Understanding Vector Graphics

The term clip art comes from way back in the days before computers were common. People who needed line art for sales and marketing materials would buy enormous clip art books. These books consisted of nothing but page after page of line drawings of just about any business subject imaginable, all crammed together with dozens of images per page. When they found an image they liked, they clipped it out of the book with scissors and used it in their layout paste-up. (There was no desktop publishing back then, of course.) As computers and desktop publishing became popular, the term clip art stuck around and began to refer to a line-art drawing saved in a file.

Usually, ...