Glossary of Print Terms

A/W - an abbreviation for Artwork.

Acetate - a transparent sheet placed over artwork allowing the artist to write instructions or indicate where second colour is to be placed. (See Overlay)

Addendum - supplementary material additional to the main body of a book and printed separately at the start or end of the text.

Airbrush - a mechanical painting tool producing an adjustable spray of paint driven by compressed air. Used in illustration design and photographic retouching.

Align - to line up typeset or other graphic material as specified, using a base or vertical line as the reference point.

Anodised plate - an offset printing plate with a specially treated surface to reduce wear during printing.

Apex - the point of a character where two lines meet at the top, an example of this is the point on the letter A.

Art paper - a smooth coated paper obtained by adding a coating of china clay compound on one or both sides of the paper. It can be gloss, satin, silk or matt finish. Art papers are used for better quality work and are almost always used for full colour work and jobs with photographs on them. Art papers are usually only available in white, so any colours or shades of colour are printed on with the other colours, usually by four colour process.

Ascender - any part of a lower case letter extending above the x-height. For example, the upper half of the vertical in the letters b or h.

Author's Corrections - changes made to the copy by the author after typesetting but not including those made as a result of errors in keying in the copy. These are charged to the customer.

Backing up - to print the second side of printed sheet.

Balloon - a circle or bubble enclosing copy in an illustration. Used in cartoons.

Bank - a lightweight writing paper. usually less than 60 gsm.

Banner - a large headline or title extending across the full page width.

Binding - various methods used to secure loose leaves or sections.

Bitmap - a grid of pixels or printed dots generated by computer to represent type and images.

Black patch - material used to mask the window area on a negative image of the artwork prior to 'stripping in' a halftone.

Blanket cylinder - the cylinder via which the inked litho plate transfers the image to the paper. The cylinder is covered with a rubber sheet which prevents wear to the litho plate coming into contact with the paper.

Bleed - the printed image extends beyond the trim edge of a sheet or page. A bleed may occur at the head, front, foot and/or gutter of a page. It is not possible to print all the way to the edge of the paper sheet. To achieve this effect it is necessary to print a larger area than is required and then trim the paper down.

Blind emboss - a raised impression made without using ink or foil.

Blow up- an enlargement, most frequently of a graphic image or photograph.

Board - the printers name for card. Paper of more than 200gsm. An uncoated board, such as a filing card is called a pulp board. They are available in white or tints (pastel colours). Coated boards (art boards) are usually only available in white.

Bold type - type with a heavier darker appearance. Most typefaces have a bold face.

Bond - paper made from wood pulp, without any coating. Copier paper is a bond. Thickness is measured by weight in grams per square metre, rather than the actual caliper of the stock. Available in weights from 60 gsm to 120 gsm and in white or tinted.

Border - a continuous decorative design or rule surrounding the matter on the page.

Box - a section of text marked off by rules or white space and presented separately from the main text and illustrations. Longer boxed sections in magazines are sometimes referred to as sidebars.

Bromide - a photographic print made on bromide paper.

Bronzing - an effect produced by dusting wet ink after printing with a metallic powder.

Bullet - a large dot preceding text to add emphasis

Calendered Paper - paper which has passed through hardened rollers during manufacture to produce a smooth surface.

Cartridge Paper - a heavy, textured paper often used for drawing.
Camera ready - artwork or pasted up material that is ready for reproduction. Cap line - an imaginary line across the top of capital letters. The distance from the the cap line to the baseline is the cap size.

Caps - an abbreviation for capital letters.

Caption - the line or lines of text that refer to information identifying a picture or illustration.

Carbonless - paper coated with chemicals and dye which will produce copies without carbon paper. Also referred to as NCR (No Carbon Required).

Case bound - a hardback book made with stiff outer covers. Cases are usually covered with cloth, vinyl or leather.

Cast coated - art paper with a exceptionally glossy coated finish, usually on one side only.

CMYK - abbreviation for cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black), the 4 process colours, which combined together in varying proportions can be made to produce the full colour spectrum.

Coated - printing papers which after making have had a surface coating with clay etc, to give a smoother, more even finish with greater opacity.

Collating - the process of assembling the various sections or sheets of a document in the correct order.

Colour Separation - process by which a continuous tone colour image is separated into the four process colours for print production.

Column rule - a light faced vertical rule used to separate columns of type.

Concertina fold - a method of folding in which each fold opens in the opposite direction to its neighbour, giving a concertina or pleated effect.

Cover Paper - a heavyweight paper made particularly to protect inner, thinner sheets of such printed items as booklets.

Crease - a printed job can be creased mechanically to make folding easier. There are times when you might want a printed piece delivered flat for ease of storage and then do the folding

Crop marks - marks at the edges of an illustration or photograph to indicate the portion to be reproduced.

Cropping - the elimination of parts of a photograph or other original that are not required to be printed. Cropping allows the remaining parts of the image to be enlarged to fill the space.

Cut flush - a method of trimming a book after the cover has been attached to the pages.

Cutout - a halftone where the background has been removed to produce a silhouette.

Die - a hardened steel engraving stamp used to print an inked image. Used in the production of good quality letter headings.

Digital Printing - digital printing work directly from electronic data and avoid the intermediate stage of films.

Double page spread - two facing pages of newspaper or magazine where the textual material on the left hand side continues across to the right hand side. Abbreviated to DPS.

Downloadable fonts - type faces which can be stored on a disk and then downloaded to the printer when required for printing. These are, by definition, bit-mapped fonts and, therefore, fixed in size and style.

DPI - the measurement of resolution for page printers, phototypesetting machines and graphics screens. Currently graphics screens reproduce 60 to 100dpi, most page printers work at 300dpi and typesetting systems operate at 1,000dpi and above. various devices.

Drawn on - a method of binding a paper cover to a book by drawing the cover on and gluing to the back of the book.

Drilling- making the holes in paper for use in a ring binder.

Dummy - a mock-up made to resemble the final printed product which uses the proposed grade, weight, finish and colour of paper.

Duotone - a two-colour halftone sometimes used in Two Colour Printing. Produces a tinted effect using a black & white original.

Electronic Publishing - a generic term for the distribution of information which is stored, transmitted and reproduced electronically.

Embossing - stamping a design into the paper to produce a raised effect.

Estimate - a price given to a customer based on specifications provided by the customer. The price can change if the order specifications are not the same as the estimate specifications.

Finishing - any process that follows the actual printing.
Flush - even with (as with to a margin).

Flyer - an inexpensively produced circular used for promotional distribution.

Foil blocking - a process for stamping a design on a book cover without ink by using a coloured foil with pressure from a heated die or block.

Font (or fount) - a complete set of characters in a typeface.

Full Colour Printing or Four Colour Process Printing - The printers name for full colour printing. The colours used are Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black, from which almost any shade of any colour can be reproduced. Also known as process work or four colour process. Full colour designs seen on a computer screen are displayed in three colours, red, green and blue (RGB). This means that the finished printed work will often look considerably different when printed in the four process colours.

Gathering - the operation of inserting the printed pages, sections or signatures of a book in the correct order for binding.

Gloss ink -for use in litho and letterpress printing on coated papers where the ink will dry without penetration.

Gravure - a rotary printing process where the image is etched into the metal plate attached to a cylinder. The cylinder is then rotated through a trough of printing ink after which the etched surface is wiped clean by a blade leaving the non-image area clean. The paper is then passed between two rollers and pressed against the etched cylinder drawing the ink out by absorption.

Grey scale - a range of luminance values for evaluating shading through white to black. Frequently used in discussions about scanners as a measure of their ability to capture halftone images. Basically the more levels the better but with correspondingly larger memory requirements.

GSM - grams per square metre. The unit of measurement for paper weight.

Gutter - the central blank area between left and right pages.

Halftone - an illustration reproduced by breaking down the original tone into a pattern of dots of varying size. Light areas have small dots and darker areas or shadows have larger dots. Tone created by varying size dots.

Hardback - a case bound book with a separate stiff board cover.

Hickeys - a dust particle sticking to the printing plate or blanket which appears on the printed sheet as a dark spot surrounded by an halo.

House style - the style of preferred spelling, punctuation, hyphenation and indentation used in a publishing house or by a particular publication to ensure consistent typesetting.

Imagesetter - device that plots high-resolution bitmaps which have been processed by a RIP.

Imposition - refers to the arrangement of pages on a printed sheet, which when the sheet is finally printed on both sides, folded and trimmed, will place the pages in their correct order.

Impression cylinder - the cylinder of a printing machine which brings the paper into contact with the with the printing plate or blanket cylinder.photographic images. It outputs a to film or paper.

Imprint - the name and place of the publisher and printer required by law if a publication is to be published. Sometimes accompanied by codes indicating the quantity printed, month/year of printing and an internal control number.

Insert - an insert is usually not secured to the main book or brochure and is sometimes referred to as a loose insert for obvious reasons.

Interleaving - Introducing alternate sheets of blank paper between the printed sheets as they come off the press to prevent set off.

Flexography - a rotary letterpress process printing from rubber or flexible plates and using fast drying inks. Mainly used for packaging.

Gatefold - an oversize page where both sides fold into the gutter in overlapping layers. Used to accommodate maps into books.

International paper sizes - the International Standards Organisation (ISO) system of paper sizes is based on a series of three sizes A, B and C. Series A is used for general printing and stationery, Series B for posters and Series C for envelopes.

ISBN - International Standard Book Number. A reference number given to every published work. Usually found on the back of the title page.

Ivory board - a smooth high white board used for business cards etc.

Justify - this is achieved by adjusting the spacing between the words and characters as necessary so that each line of text finishes at the same point.

Justified - the alignment of text along a margin or both margins.

Kerning - the adjustment of spacing between certain letter pairs, A and V for example, to obtain a more pleasing appearance. Not all DTP systems can achieve this.

Keyline - an outline drawn or set on artwork showing the size and position of an illustration or halftone.

Kraft paper - a tough brown paper used for packing.

Laid - uncoated paper often used for business stationery which has a textured pattern of parallel

Laminate - a thin transparent plastic coating applied to paper or board to provide protection and give it a glossy finish.

Landscape - the orientation of the page so that the long edge is along the bottom.

Layout - a sketch of a page for printing showing the position of text and illustrations and giving general instructions.

Lead or Leading - space added between lines of type to space out text and provide visual separation of the lines. Measured in points or fractions thereof. Named after the strips of lead which used to be inserted between lines of metal type.

Letterpress - a relief printing process in which a raised image is inked to produce an impression; the impression is then transferred by placing paper against image and applying pressure.

Letterset - a printing process combining offset printing with a letterpress relief printing plate.

Linen tester - a magnifying glass designed for checking the dot image of a halftone.

Logo - short for logotype. A word or combination of letters set as a single unit. Also used to denote a specially styled company name designed as part of a corporate image.

Loose leaf - a method of binding which allows the insertion and removal of pages for continuous updating.

Magnetic ink - a magnetised ink that can be read both by humans and by electronic machines. Used in cheque printing.

Make-ready - the processes involved in getting a press ready for a print run.

Make-up - the assembling of all elements, to form the printed image.

Manilla - a tough brown paper used to produce stationery and wrapping paper.

Mask - a opaque material or masking tape used to block-off an area of the artwork.

Matt art - a coated printing paper with a dull surface.

Metallic ink - printing inks which produce an effect gold, silver, bronze or metallic colours.

Mock-up - the rough visual of a publication or design.

Montage - a single image formed from the assembling of several images.

Mounting board - a heavy board used for mounting artwork.

NCR - No Carbon Required (NCR) and is the popular name for self-carbonising paper.

Numbering - the addition of a unique sequential number to each sheet.

Newsprint - unsized, low quality, absorbent paper used for printing newspapers.

Offset Printing - printing system where the paper does not come into contact with the printing plate. The ink is transferred from the plate to a blanket cylinder and then to the paper.

Opacity - term used to describe the degree to which paper will show print through.

Overlay - a transparent sheet used in the preparation of multi-colour artwork showing the colour breakdown.

Overprinting - printing over an area already printed. Used to emphasise changes or alterations.

Overs - additional paper required to compensate for spoilage in printing. Also used to refer to a quantity produced above the number of copies ordered.

Pagination - the numbering of pages in a book.

Pantone - a registered name for an ink colour matching system. Colours are specified as numbers, i.e. PMS 032, sometimes followed by the letter U or C. The letters simply mean how the same ink colour looks on either uncoated stock or coated stock as the colours often look totally different on each.

Paper plate - a short run offset printing plate on which matter can be typed directly.

Parallel fold - a method of folding; e.g. two parallel folds will produce a six page sheet.

Paste up - the various elements of a layout mounted in position to form camera-ready artwork.

Perfect Binding - a type of book binding where the pages are held in the spine by glue. Many magazines and most paperback books are perfect bound.

Perfector - a printing press which prints both sides of the paper at one pass through the machine.

Perforations - the tiny holes or slits that enable a sheet to be pulled out of a book. A perforation may be down or across the sheet, but generally has to go all the way across or down. Occasionally, a job will appear where the perforation has stopped before the edge. This costs considerably more to produce and is called a stopped perf.

Portrait - the orientation of the page so that the short edge is along the bottom.

Postscript - the brand name of a software standard created by Adobe. It is a page description language which is used by most graphics software and output devices to combine text, pictures and graphical elements into an electronic document and create output which can be used by the printer.

Printing plate - the physical plate which carries the image. These can be made from a variety of materials.

Point - a measurement for the size of type, distance between lines and thickness of rules. One point equals one seventy-second of an inch (0.3515mm).

Portrait - an upright image or page where the height is greater than the width.

Primary colours - cyan, magenta and yellow. These three colours when mixed together with black will produce a reasonable reproduction of all other colours.

Proof - a test print produced to show what the finished product will look like. These can be made in a variety of different ways and at different stages of the production process. The simplest form is a colour laser or inkjet print which can create a rough impression. It should be remembered that at this point there are still a number of stages through which the data has to pass and therefore a laser print cannot be relied upon as an accurate proofing method.

Ragged right - typesetting style in which lines end in unequal lengths on the right side (usually justified on left).

Registration marks - crosses or other marks placed on artwork which ensure perfect alignment ('registration').

Resolution - the number of dots per inch (dpi) in a computer-processed document. The level detail retained by a printed document increases with higher resolution.

Raster Image Processor (RIP) - the hardware engine which calculates the bit-mapped image of text and graphics from a series of instructions. It may, or may not, understand a page description language but the end result should, if the device has been properly designed, be the same. A basic page printer comes with a controller and not a RIP which goes some way to explaining the lack of control

Ream - 500 sheets of paper.

Register marks - used in colour printing to position the paper correctly. Usually crosses or circles.

Register - the correct positioning of an image especially when printing one colour on another.

Resolution - the measurement used in typesetting to express quality of output. Measured in dots per inch, the greater the number of dots, the more smoother and cleaner appearance the character/image will have. Currently Page (laser) Printers print at 300, 406 and 600dpi. Typesetting machines print at 1,200 dpi or more.

Retouching - a means of altering artwork or colour separations to correct faults or enhance the image.

Reversed out - type appearing white on a black or colour background, either a solid or a tint.

Royal - a size of printing paper 508 x 635mm (20in x 25in).

Run-on - often when a printing price is quoted it is given as a figure for the basic job plus a figure for additional copies. It is very important to note that the run-on price is for copies printed at the same time as the main run.

Saddle stitch - a binding process in which a pamphlet or booklet is stapled through the middle fold of its sheets using saddle wire. Usually limited to 64 pages size. You may call it stapling but printers call it stitching.

Score - a pressed mark in a sheet of paper, usually a thick paper, to make folding cleaner and easier.

Screen Printing - a process where the ink is transferred to the printing surface by being squeezed through a fine fabric sheet stretched on a frame. The screen carries a stencil which defines the image area. Screen printing is usually used for large poster work and display material. Good for surfaces such as clothing or plastic objects. It is often referred to as silkscreen printing although the screens are generally made from artificial fibres.

Section - a printed sheet folded to make a multiple of pages.

Security paper - paper incorporating special features (dyes, watermarks etc) for use on cheques.

Self cover - the paper used inside a booklet is the same as that used for the cover and is generally printed on the same press run.

Set off - the accidental transfer of the printed image from one sheet to the back of another.

Sheet - a single piece of paper.

Sheet fed - a printing press which prints single sheets of paper, not reels.

Signature- a letter or figure printed on the first page of each section of a book and used as a guide when collating and binding.

Spine - the binding edge at the back of a book.

SRA - a paper size in the series of ISO international paper sizes slightly larger than the A series allowing the printer extra space to bleed.

Strawboard - a thicker board made from straw pulp, used in bookwork and in the making of envelopes and cartons. Not suitable for printing.

Solid - an area on the page which is completely covered by the ink.

Stock - a general term for any paper or board which is used as a printed surface.

Swatch - a colour sample.

Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) - a common format for interchanging digital information, generally associated with greyscale or bitmap data.

Thermography - a print finishing process producing a raised image imitating die stamping. The process takes a previously printed image which before the ink is dry is dusted with a resinous powder. The application of heat causes the ink and powder to fuse and a raised image is formed.

Transparency - or slide: 35mm, 4" x 5" or 8" x 10" positive image on film which can be projected on a screen or scanned as artwork.
Tint - an area of tone made by a pattern of dots, which lightens the apparent colour of the ink with which it is printed.

Tinted - the printers term for coloured paper. Pastel tints are cheaper than intensive (deep colour) tints.

Varnishing - a finishing process whereby a transparent varnish is applied over the printed sheet to produce a glossy finish.

Vellum - the treated skin of a calf used as a writing material. The name is also used to describe a thick creamy book paper.

Vertical justification - the ability to adjust the interline spacing (leading) and manipulation of text in fine increments to make columns and pages end at the same point on a page.

Watermark - an impression incorporated in the paper making process showing the name of the paper and/or the company logo.

Web - a web printing machine is one that accepts the paper on a large roll (the web). These are very fast presses and are only economic for long run and high volume work

Weight of paper - The bulk of most papers is measured in grams per square metre (gsm). Although not a measure of thickness, GSM gives an idea of the feel. Board is usually, although not always, measured in microns which is a measure of thickness. A 200 micron board is around 160 gsm in weight.

Woodfree paper - made from chemical pulp only with size added.

Work and turn - a method of printing where pages are imposed in one forme or assembled on one film. One side is then printed and the sheet is then turned over and printed from the other edge using the same forme. The finished sheet is then cut to produce two complete copies.

Work and tumble - a method of printing where pages are again imposed together. The sheet is then printed on one side with the sheet being turned or tumbled from front to rear to print the opposite side.

Wove - a finely textured paper without visible wire marks.

Wash up - single colour printing machines normally run in black ink. Full colour machines run in black, magenta, cyan and yellow. The use of any other colour will incur a wash-up charge, for the time spent in washing down the rollers and ink ducts to take another ink colour. Very light coloured inks and metallics cost more because the wash-up takes longer.