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Anyone who has worked in the Print Media or Graphic Communications industry is aware of the unusual jargon used every day. When put together, they form an impressive lexicon comprised of hundreds of words - likely enough to formulate a separate dialect of the English language. Let’s call it Printinese! What follows is an alphabet of some of the unusual terms or odd definitions applied to common words used in Graphic Communications.

A Printers Alphabet Primer (in Printinese)

— A —

• Alley – the space between columns of type
• Ascender – the part of a lower case letter extending above the x-height (see below)

— B —

• Bezier – computer generated curved lines, which due to arrangement of pixels, remain smooth regardless of changes in object size
• Bleed – a portion of a printed image, which extends beyond a finished document size and is later trimmed allowing for printing to extend to the edges of a page
• Butt – aligning printed images so that they do not overlap

— C —

• Choke – a trapping technique in which a printed usually lighter colored background image overlaps a surrounded darker colored image in order to achieve registration (i.e. prevent unprinted outlines around images)
• Caret – a symbol used by proof reader to indicate insertion of a missing element (^)
• Creep – when folded pages are put together (see “nested” below) to make a book, the thickness of the paper causes inner pages to push out creating an uneven shingled edge
• Calender – spelled “er”, and referring to a large roller, which flattens and smooths paper during the manufacturing process.

— D —

• Ductor – a type of roller on a printing press mechanically devised to transfer ink from an ink trough to distribution rollers on a printing press
• Doctor – a scrapping device used to squeegee ink from the non-printing areas of a gravure printing plate

— E —

• Eps – a file format used by printers to ensure high quality printing of jobs which are comprised of complex and varied image elements
• Em – a wide space used in typography, originally based upon the width of the letter ”M”.

— F —

• Folio – a sheet of paper folded in half to make a four page booklet or signature
• Furnish – once additives are added to paper pulp in the manufacturing process, the mixture is called furnish or slurry

— G —

• Gutter – the inside margin of a book
• Gang – an imposition technique used by printers, in which several different jobs are printed on the same sheet of paper
• Ghosting – a printing problem, where due to inadequate ink coverage images from one part of a document faintly appear in a solid area of the same page

— H —

• Hickey – when impurities in ink adhere to image areas of an offset plate, they often depress the rubber blanket creating a hollow ring or donut, which appears as a flaw on the printed page
• Halo – a printing distortion where the outer edges of a dot or letter appear darker than the inside areas

— I —

• Interleaving – the placing of sheets of paper between sets of books separate them or between individual pages to prevent transfer of wet ink
• Imposition – refers to the pattern in which pages are laid out on a page for efficiency and correct sequencing

— J —

• Jogger – a bindery machine used to jog or align the edges of a stack of paper
• Justify – to align both left and right edges of a lines in a column of text

— K —

• Kern – the typographical technique of altering spaces between individual letters or characters
• Kiss – refers to the least amount of impression pressure required to transfer an image onto a sheet of paper

— L —

• Leading – a typography term referring to spaces between lines of type
• Lap – a technique for overlapping the edges of printed images to ensure that they do not separate during printing preventing outlines or empty spaces
• Loupe – a magnifier used to examine accuracy of printing
• Ligature – some fonts will combine common letter pairs to create a single character e.g. f l — ? or a e — æ

— M —

• Moiré – photographic images rows of dots if the angle and in 4 color printing, the layers of dots must be printed at precise relative angles otherwise unacceptable kaleidoscopic patterns are created
• Monarch – a stationery size of approximately 7 x 10 inches

— N —

• Nested – printing signatures fitted on inside another to form a booklet
• Nipping – the phase in bookmaking, where books are pressed or flattened prior to binding

— O —

• Overprint – when a layer of ink is printed over another previously printed image
• Offset – the printing process where an image is transferred from a master plate to a rubber blanket prior to imaging on a substrate (i. e. printing surface)
• Orphan – in typography, when a single word is left on a line in a body of text

— P —

• Pica – a system of measurement used by printers and graphic designers (one inch = 6 picas or 72 points)
• Picking – tacky ink and paper with poor surface strength may result in pieces of paper being picked off the page during printing

— Q —

• Quoin – a devise used in traditional letterpress to lock type into position
• Quire – 25 sheets of paper, 25 x 20 = 1 ream or 500 sheets, a standard measure of paper quantity
• Quorto – a signature created when a piece of paper is folded twice to create an 8 page imposition

— R —

• Reverse – when instead of inking and printing a character onto paper, the background is instead printed allowing the paper color to form the image (often perceived as white images on a black background)
• Recto – the right side page in a printed document

— S —

• Slug – a non-printing area of a page layout program containing identification information about the document,
• Set-off – during printing, wet ink transferring to the back of the sheet on top is called set-off

— T —

• Tiff – TIFF (tagged information file format) is the preferred lossless format for photographs to be reproduced at high quality
• Tag – heavy, durable type of paper used for folders
• Trap – the printing technique of overlapping image areas to maintain registration (see Lap)

— U —

• Up – a suffix applied to a number, which will indicate the number of repeats of the same job on a single printing sheet, implemented for efficiency (e.g. 10-up)
• Un-sharp – an un-sharp mask or filter is used to make an image sharper by defining or smoothing the edges of dots or shapes

— V —

• Verso – the left side page of a printed document
• Vellum – a descriptor a rougher than smooth paper finish; eggshell and antique are other examples

— W —

• Wire side – when paper is made, one side of the sheet rests upon a wire screen, which leaves a faint wire patterned impression; the top of the same sheet is called the felt side.
• Widow – in typography, when a single line of type from a body of text flows onto a separate page

— X —

• x-height – in typography, the height of the main body of a lower case letter character such as “a”, “c”, “e”, but excluding descender parts as in “q” or “p” or the ascenders of “d” and “b”.
• xerography – sometimes used to describe photocopying

— Y —

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