# 5. Everything can be edited & customized

## How to develop these abilities

### 5. Everything can be edited & customized

*Almost* everything, anyway.

***This is one of the best ways to learn a lot about computing in a very short time.***

For example, you can use the web browser's *Inspect* tool to edit webpage content and styling. (Note that this only applies to the page that is on your screen — you are not editing the page on the server, nobody else will see your edits.)

I use this regularly, usually for simple things like changing the font or the line height, which dramatically affect readability.

I used to study my degree at university remotely. The content presentation was terrible and I found it very hard to stay focussed on reading. I started experimenting with re-styling the text, using concepts to increase focus — putting it into narrower columns, increasing the text size, changing the font to a more readable one, even applying a heavy underline to help my eyes keep track of the sentences. Then it occurred to me that there is probably at least one browser extension for applying custom CSS[^1] (styling) to a web page, with a GUI editor and the ability to save the CSS for specific websites and web pages.

***Learn to think with this idea:\*\*\*\*&#x20;**<mark style="color:green;">**“Everything I see can be altered somehow.”**</mark>*

Of course, there are practical limitations — don't expect to alter applications without editing the source code, which you can't do anyway unless you have access to the code.

PDFs are off limits too. PDF "editors" exist, but a PDF is essentially an unregimented map of objects. There is no "text region" or the likes — when you import a PDF into any document editor, the text strings are imported as just that: strings of text, usually disconnected from each other.

But, by looking at everything with the "can I edit this?" mentality, you will quickly discover what can & can't be edited, what software exists in order to edit it, and how to use those pieces of software.

You will learn a lot in a short time, about software, file formats, and computers in general.

You will learn how & *why* to save your files in certain formats, about lossy & lossless file compression, about saving versions of your important files, about why you shouldn't open special file formats in the wrong applications, and much, much more.

[^1]: *Cascading Style Sheet*, the code format for applying styles and themes to web pages.