Printing Terms.txt

Bindery term, two or more parallel folds which open like an accordion.

At right angles to direction of paper grain.

Weight in pounds of a ream of paper cut to the basic size for its grade.

To fasten sheets or signatures with wire, thread, glue. or by other means.

thick rubber mat on a printing press that transfers ink from the plate to paper.

Printing that goes to the edge of the sheet after trimming.

• Strong durable paper grade used for letterheads and business forms.
• Having a weight greater than 50 g/m2

The brilliance or reflectance of paper.

Thickness of paper stock in thousandths of an inch or number of pages per inch.

a type of binding used in making hard cover books using glue.

Coated paper with a high gloss reflective finish.

Transparency

A clay coated printing paper with a smooth finish.

A finishing term for gathering paper in a precise order.

A quality control term regarding the spots of ink colour on the tail of a sheet.

Illustrations, photographs or computer files that contain gradient tones from black to white or light to dark.

The tonal change in color from light to dark.

To cut off parts of a picture or image.

Printed lines showing where to trim a printed sheet.

• A quality control devise to measure the density of printing ink.
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The degree of color or darkness of an image or photograph.

A light sensitive coating used on printing plates.

Curing images in or out of paper.

An element of halftones. Using a loupe you will see that printed pictures are made many dots.

A term used to explain the difference in size between the dot on film v paper.

A halftone picture made up of two printed colors.

Light sensitive coating found on printing plates and film.

The process of combining four basic colors to create a printed color picture or colors composed from the basic four colors. CMYK

Two folds at right angles to each other.

A faint printed image that appears on a printed sheet where it was not intended. More often than not this problem is a function of graphical design. It is hard to tell when or where ghosting will occur. Sometimes you can see the problem developing immediately after printing the sheet, other times the problem occurs while drying. However the problem occurs it is costly to fix, if it can be fixed. Occasionally it can be eliminated by changing the color sequence, the inks, the paper, changing to a press with a drier, printing the problem area in a separate pass through the press or changing the racking (reducing the number of sheets on the drying racks). Since it is a function of graphical design, the buyer pays for the increased cost.

The direction in which the paper fiber lie.

Converting a continuous tone to dots for printing.

Positioning printed pages so they will fold in the proper order.

To mask out an image.

• Drawing consisting of lines or solid areas that can easily be printed without conversion to halftone image dots; also called line drawing.
• High contrast copy not requiring a halftone.

• refers to everything done on a press to prepare for the final print job.
• All the activities required to prepare a press for printing.

The tones in a photograph that are approximately half as dark as the shadow area.

500 sheets of paper.

printed sheet is 'in-register', it means that all the plates - Cyan, Maganeta, Yellow and Black, in the case of a four color process job - are lining up accurately on the printing press and producing a clearly defined color image.If a job is out of register, there will be a blurring at the edges of images that are made up of more than one color.

Binding a booklet or magazine with staples in the seam where it folds.

A crease put on paper to help it fold better.

• A sheet of printed pages which when folded become a part of a book or publication.
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The binding edge of a book or publication.

Any surface on which printing is done.

A term of basis weight when referring to bond papers.

A shade of a single color or combined colors.

The ability to print one ink over the other.

• Printing one side of a sheet and turning it over from the gripper to the tail to print the second side using the same side guide and plate for the second side.
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• Printing one side of a sheet and turning it over from left to right ussing the same side guides and plate for the second side.
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The arrangement of document pages so that they will appear in the correct order after the document has been printed and folded.

• Choking is a type of trap that involves reducing he size of a graphic colour to trap the inner colour, resulting in a hairline trap.
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The process whereby the four (CMYK) process printing colours are separated into their primary colors to allow for professional printing.

• The range of colors available to a specific output device, such as a laserprinter or an imagesetter. If the color range is too wide for that particular device, it is referred to as 'out of gamut'.
• For example, the RGB color range is much broader than the CMYK color gamut (which is what most pre-press output devices use).
• Colors specified using the RGB gamut will often fall out of the gamut range when output on a CMYK device.

• Knockout is a trapping related term. It refers to the process where two colours print exactly next to each other, without overlap - hence no trapping has been applied.The danger with object knocking out is misregister, which allows white space to show between the objects.
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Lab is a color system that was developed as a method of calculating all the colours that are viewable by the human eye. Lab color is a mathematical model defined in terms of luminosity and brightness, as well as two axes - green to magenta and blue to yellows.The Lab color model incorporates all the colors in the CMYK spectrum and the RGB color spectrum and is often used as an intermediary when converting one format to the other in an image editor, such as Adobe Photoshop.

Also referred to as the line screen frequency, this refers to the measure of distance between the rows of dots that make up a halftone screen. Lower line screens are used on rougher, low quality printing substrates (such as newsprint), whilst higher line screens are used for high quality print jobs on smooth art papers.

• Pantone Matching System, PMS
• Pantone color matching system is the most popular method of specifying extra colors – not out of the CMYK four color process – for print. Pantone colors are numbered and are made up out of a base set of colors.
• By specifying a specific Pantone color, a designer knows that there is little chance of color variance on the presses.
• Pantones are generally used as spot colors, such as logos, to ensure color consistency for corporate identities. However, they can also be used in halftone graphics and for duotones.Pantones can also be simulated using the colors from the CMYK spectrum – and Pantone even publish a guide for doing so.
• However, the results can often be unsatisfactory, especially for greens and oranges. This is one of the motivations for the development of theHexachrome printing system.

A RIP is a hardware or software tool that processes a digital PostScript file and converts it - rasterises - to a printable format.

Rasterizing (or rasterising) a graphic is to convert it from vector data to bitmap pixels. Adobe Photoshop will rasterize an image when it opens an EPS file from Illustrator, for example

For the sake of graphics reproduction, the resolution of a bitmap digital graphics image is a measure of its quality, or the amount of digital information it contains. Resolution is measured by the amount of pixels an image contains in height and width. For professional printed reproduction, the resolution of a bitmap graphics file must be between 1.5 and 2.5 times the resolution of the line screen. See also: Line screen, High resolution, Low resolution.

As regards color reproduction, a spread is a trapping reference. A spread is created when the inner, or lighter, graphic is set to spread out to overlap an outer, darker, object to create the trap.

Because the commercial printing process involves laying down colours in sequence , as opposed to, for example, laser printing, it is nearly impossible to align every graphic object exactly.Because of this, objects of different colours, that are next to each other, are set to trap. What this means in practice is that one object overlaps the other by a fraction of a millimetre, thereby ensuring that there is no white space in-between them.

• - Press-sheets
• are the rough uncut flats of paper a (commercial) printer uses to print your documents on.
• After the press-sheets are printed the printer will cut clean your layout (by cutting away the bleed).