This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2011) For the R.E.M. album, see Document (album). For the similarly-named surrealist journal, see Documents (journal). A document is a work of non-fiction writing intended to store and communicate information, thus acting as a recording. Documents are often the focus and concern of business administration and government administration. The word is also used as a verb as "documenting" describes the process of making a document.

The term document may be applied to any discrete representation of meaning, but usually it refers to something physical like one or more printed pages, or to a "virtual" document in electronic (digital) format. Contents 1 Types of documents 2 Developing documents 3 History 4 In law 5 See also 6 Further reading // Types of documents Documents are sometimes classified as secret, private or public. They may also be described as a draft or proof. When a document is copied, the source is referred to as the original.

There are accepted standards for specific applications in various fields, such as: Academia: thesis, dissertation, paper, journal Business and accounting: invoice, quote, RFP, proposal, contract Law and politics: summons, certificate, license, gazette Government and industry: white paper Media and marketing: brief, mock-up, script Such standard documents can be created based on a template. Developing documents The page layout of a document is the manner in which information is graphically arranged in the document space (e.g., on a page). If the appearance of the document is of concern, page layout is generally the responsibility of a graphic designer. Typography deals with the design of letter and symbol forms, as well as their physical arrangement in the document (see typesetting). Information design focuses on the effective communication of information, especially in industrial documents and public signs. Simple text documents may not require a visual design and may be handled by an author, clerk or transcriber. Forms may require a visual design for the initial fields, but not to fill out the forms. History

Traditionally, the medium of a document was paper and the information was applied to it as ink, either by hand (to make a hand-written document) or by a mechanical process (such as a printing press or, more recently, a laser printer). Through time, documents have also been written with ink on papyrus (starting in ancient Egypt) or parchment; scratched as runes on stone using a sharp apparatus; stamped or cut into clay and then baked to make clay tablets (e.g., in the Sumerian and other Mesopotamian civilisations). The paper, papyrus or parchment might be rolled up as a scroll or cut into sheets and bound into a book. Today short documents might also consist of sheets of paper stapled together. TRACK CHANGES Modern electronic means of storing and displaying documents include: desktop computer and monitor (or laptop, tablet PC, etc.); optionally with a printer to obtain a hard copy Personal digital assistant (PDA) dedicated e-book device electronic paper information appliances digital audio players radio and television service provider

Digital documents usually have to adhere to a specific file format in order to be useful. In law Documents in all forms are frequently found to be material evidence in criminal and civil proceedings. The forensic analysis of such a document falls under the scope of questioned document examination. For the purpose of cataloging and managing the large number of documents that may be produced in the course of a law suit, Bates numbering is often applied to all documents so that each document has a unique, aribitrary identifying number. See also Document file format Desktop publishing Historical document Word processor Documentary film Further reading Please expand this article using the suggested source(s) below. More information might be found in a section of the talk page. Buckland, Michael K. (1998). "What is a 'document'?". Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48 (9): 804–809. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199709)48:9<804::AID-ASI5>3.0.CO;2-V.