Aqueous coating: A water-based coating applied after printing that gives an added glossy finish to the paper and helps prevent the underlying ink from dirt and damage.

Bit-mapped fonts: Fonts created in a graphic mode that describes an image made of pixels, where the pixel is either on (black) or off (white).

Bleed: Printing that extends beyond the trim edge of a page. To print a bleed, the piece is printing on oversized paper, which is trimmed after printing.

Brightness: The light-reflecting property of paper in comparison with a standard reference. Paper brightness affects the legibility and contrast of printing.

C1S: Paper with coating on one side only.

C2S: Paper with coating on both sides.

CMYK: An abbreviation for the four primary colors used in four-color process printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Coated paper: Paper with a surface coating imparting a smooth finish. Coated paper finishes have a higher opacity and better ink holdout than uncoated papers.

Cropping: The cutting out of extraneous parts of an image, usually a photograph.

Density: The specific weight of paper per unit volume. Density directly relates to the paper's absorbency, stiffness, opacity and resiliency.

Digital color printing: Also known as direct-to-plate technology. A printing process that allows color printing directly from an electronic file without the need for film or color separations.

Dots-per-inch (dpi): The measurement used to indicate how many dots or pixels appear within a vertical and horizontal inch of a graphic. This measurement is used to define the quality of an image's resolution.

Duotone: a halftone image printed with two colors, one dark and the other lighter. The same photograph is halftoned twice, using the same screen at two different angles. Combining the two improves the detail and contrast in the final printed image.

Embossing: An impression of an image in relief to achieve a raised surface on paper.

EPS (Encapsulated PostScript): A vector graphic file format.

Finish: The surface contour and characteristics of paper measurable by smoothness, gloss, absorbency and print quality.

Foil-stamping: A process wherein a thin, flexible sheet of metal or plastic is used to cover an area of a printed page.

Folding: The process by which a press sheet is folded. There are a wide variety of folding options.

Font: A set of characters in a specific typeface, at a specific point size and in a specific style.

Four-color process: A printing process that uses a layering of four primary ink colors CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to reproduce color images.

GIF (Graphic Interchange Format): An imaging standard that uses pixels to recreate an image electronically, often used for animation.

Gloss: A paper's shine or luster.

Halftone: In traditional publishing, a continuous tone image photographed through a screen in order to create small dots of varying sizes that can be reproduced on a printing press. Digital halftones are produced by sampling a continuous tone image and assigning different numbers of dots, which simulate different sized dots, for the same effect.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group): An electronic proof and digital form of presenting images good for showing photographs on a computer monitor. The images will be very clear on a monitor, but do not translate well to printing.

Matte finish: Coated papers with little or no gloss. A matte coated sheet is often specified when the printed pages will contain a lot of type, since the low gloss makes for easier reading.

Offset paper: Paper that contains the quality characteristics needed in order to withstand the rigors of offset presses.

Opacity: A property of paper that minimizes the show-through of printing from the opposite side or the adjacent sheet. Opacity is influenced by the paper's weight, brightness and type of fiber.

Pantone® / PMS: the company who makes the Pantone® Matching System, a standard color-matching system used by printers and graphic designers for inks, papers and other materials. A PMS color is a standard color defined by percentage mixtures of different primary inks.

PDF (Portable Document File): A low resolution electronic proofing method produced using Adobe Acrobat.

Pixel (picture element): the smallest spot of phosphor on a display monitors that can be lit up on a screen.

Plate: Short for printing plate, this is generally a thin sheet of metal that carries the printing image. The plate surface is treated or configured so that only the printing image is ink receptive.

Printer font: high-resolution bitmaps or font outline masters used for the actual laying down of the characters on the printed page, as opposed to display on the screen.

Process color separation: The process used to reproduce color images by creating and superimposing halftone dots from the four basic colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Proof: A representation of the printed piece, created either electronically or in print, that demonstrates what has been produced in the film or plate procedures.

RGB: The color space commonly used for computer monitors and that divides color into the three primary colors of light: red, green and blue.

Resolution: The quality of graphics in relation to the number of dots-per-inch or pixels the graphic has. A high resolution graphic has more dots-per-inch (dpi) and a low resolution graphic has a lower dpi.

Scaling: Reduction or enlargement of artwork, which can be proportional (most frequently used) or disproportional. In desktop publishing, optimal scaling of bitmaps is reduction or enlargement that will avoid or reduce moiré patterns.

Scoring: A mechanical means of pressing a channel into a sheet of paper to facilitate folding while guarding against cracking the paper. Scoring is typically used when heavyweight papers are folded.

Screen (tint): A uniform dotted fill pattern, described in a percentage, such as 50% screen.

Screen font: Low-resolution bitmaps of type characters that show the positioning and size of characters on a computer screen.

TIFF Tagged Image File Format): a bitmap graphic file format.

Trim size: The size of the printed sheet of page once it has been trimmed.

Trimming: Cutting paper after printing to make all sheets the same or a specified size.

Uploading: A form of file transfer in which files from one computer are uploaded to a designated server site. This technique can be used for files up to 5 MB.

UV coating: A very slick, glossy coating applied to the printed paper surface and dried on press with ultraviolet light. The slick surface of UV coating makes it eye catching and popular for printing covers on paperback novels.