Perfect Binding
A way of adhesive binding multi-section jobs. Individual sections are collected together and the spine is ground off (typically 3mm). Glue is then applied to the spine and a cover pulled on before the product is trimmed to size.


Saddle Stitching
In binding, to fasten a booklet by wiring it (stapling) through the middle fold of the sheets.


Spiral Binding
A book bound with wires in spiral form inserted through holes punched along the binding.

Printed area which extends off the trimmed area. 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. Typically a designer would allow an extra 3mm of bleed to colour and image areas to allow for a little leeway when trimming.

CMYK:
CMYK (short for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key) is a subtractive color model used in four colour process printing.
This color model is based on mixing pigments of the following colors in order to make other colors:
• C = Cyan
• M = Magenta
• Y = Yellow
• K = Key (Black).
The mixture of ideal CMY colors is subtractive (cyan, magenta, and yellow printed together on white result in black). CMYK works through light absorption. The colors that are seen are from the part of light that is not absorbed. In CMYK, magenta plus yellow produces red, magenta plus cyan makes blue and cyan plus yellow generates green.

Pantone:
Pantone, Pantone Matching System and PMS + are Pantone Inc’s industry-standard trademarks for colour standards, colour data, colour reproduction and colour reproduction materials, and other colour related products and services, meeting its specifications, control and quality requirements.

RGB:
Red, green, blue additive primary colours.

In printing, marks placed on the copy to indicate the edge of the paper. Used as a guide when cutting documents to finished size.

The process of using sharp steel rules to cut special shapes, such as the pockets of a folder.

Printing processes in which information is transferred from a computer directly onto paper, without the need for film and printing plates. Digital printing is faster and more cost-effective for small/medium print runs and allows special techniques such as personalisation and printing-on-demand.

Encapsulation
A form of protective enclosure for papers and other flat objects; involves placing the item between two sheets of transparent polyester film (available in various thicknesses) that are subsequently sealed around all edges.

Lamination
A plastic film bonded by heat and pressure to a printed sheet for protection. Available in matt or gloss finish.

Bitmap:
.BMP or .DIB (device-independent bitmap) is a bitmapped graphics format used internally by the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 graphics subsystem (GDI), and used commonly as a simple graphics file format on that platform.
Images are generally stored with a color depth of 2 (1-bit), 16 (4-bit), 256 (8-bit), 65,536 (16-bit), or 16.7 million (24-bit) colors (the bits represent the bits per pixel). 8-bit images can also be greyscale instead of indexed color. An alpha channel (for transparency) may be stored in a separate file, where it is similar to a greyscale image. A 32-bit version with integrated alpha channel has been introduced with Windows XP and is used within its logon and theme system; it has yet to gain wide support in image editing software.

EPS Files:
Encapsulated PostScript, or EPS, is a DSC-conforming PostScript document with additional restrictions intended to make EPS files usable as a graphics file format. In other words, EPS files are more-or-less self-contained, reasonably predictable PostScript documents that describe an image or drawing, that can be placed within another PostScript document.
At a minimum, an EPS file contains a BoundingBox DSC comment, describing the rectangle containing the image described by the EPS file. Applications can use this information to lay out the page, even if they are unable to directly render the PostScript inside.
EPS, together with DSC's Open Structuring Conventions, form the basis of early versions of the Adobe Illustrator Artwork file format.

TIFF Files:
Tagged Image File Format (abbreviated TIFF) is a file format for mainly storing images, including photographs and line art. Originally created by the company Aldus, jointly with Microsoft, for use with PostScript printing, TIFF is a popular format for high color depth images, along with JPEG and PNG. TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications such as Photoshop by Adobe, GIMP, Ulead PhotoImpact and Paint Shop Pro by Corel, by desktop publishing and page layout applications, such as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign, and by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition, and other applications. TIFF was chosen as the native format for raster graphics in the NeXTstep operating system, and this TIFF support carried over into Mac OS X. Adobe Systems, which acquired the PageMaker publishing program from Aldus, now controls the TIFF specification, although it has not had a major update since 1992 (several technical notes have been published with minor extensions to the format).

Vector Graphics:
Vector graphics (also called geometric modeling or object-oriented graphics) is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and polygons, which are all based upon mathematical equations to represent images in computer graphics. It is used by contrast to the term raster graphics, which is the representation of images as a collection of pixels (dots).

RAW:
A raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of a digital camera or image scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and ready to use with a bitmap graphics editor,or printed. Normally, the image must be processed and converted to an RGB format such as TIFF or JPEG before it can be manipulated.
Benefits:
Nearly all digital cameras can process the image from the sensor into a JPEG file using settings for white balance, color saturation, contrast, and sharpness that are either selected automatically or entered by the photographer before taking the picture. Cameras that support raw files save these settings in the file, but defer the processing. This results in an extra step for the photographer, so RAW is normally only used when additional computer processing is intended. However, RAW permits much greater control than JPEG for several reasons:
• Finer control is easier for the settings when a mouse and keyboard are available to set them. For example, the white point can be set to any value, not just discrete values like "daylight" or "incandescent".
• The settings can be previewed and tweaked to obtain the best quality image or desired effect. (With in-camera processing, the values must be set before the exposure). This is especially pertinent to the white balance setting since color casts can be difficult to correct after the conversion to RGB is done.
• Camera raw files have 12 or 14 bits of brightness information. But you cannot compare this number alone to other methods. JPEG stores a brightness gradient in an 8-bit number every 4 or 8 pixels and stores color values even more infrequently depending on the parameters used. Because of this JPEG loses fine details and is ill-suited for major color or brightness changes. By comparison the mosaicing used by the Bayer filter in raw files changes colors every 3-4 pixels and brightness every 1-2 pixels producing much finer resolution detail in a same size image. And because it is 12-bit each of these values are far more precise.
• The working color space can be set to whatever is desired.
• Different demosaicing algorithms can be used, not just the one coded into the camera.

Lithographic Printing
A conventional (non-digital) print process. The process works by first transferring an image to thin metal, paper, or plastic printing plates. Rollers apply oil-based ink and water to the plates. Only the inked image portion is transferred to a rubber blanket that then transfers the image onto the paper as it passes between it and another cylinder beneath the paper.

Portable Document Format (PDF), sometimes mistaken for "Printable Document Format", is an open file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 and is now being prepared for submission as an ISO standard[1]. It is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a device independent and resolution independent fixed-layout document format. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a 2D document (and, with the advent of Acrobat 3D, embedded 3D documents) that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics that compose the document. PDF files do not encode information that is specific to the application software, hardware, or operating system used to create or view the document. This feature ensures that a valid PDF will render exactly the same regardless of its origin or destination (but depending on font availability when fonts are not encapsulated in the file).
PDF files are most appropriately used to encode the exact look of a document in a device-independent way. While PDF can describe very simple one page documents, it may also be used for many pages, complex documents that use a variety of fonts, graphics, colors, and images.

What is Registration
Registration is printing specific extra marks so that different artwork can be aligned. These are known as Registration Marks in Desktop Publishing.

Why registration is necessary
Registration is to help align different colours to form a continuous tone image. Different printing devices have different methods of creating color. Often this requires a pass to create one colour component, and then another pass to create more. Combined these should create the optical illusion of colour. But by splitting the colour creation into many discreet passes the process becomes prone to error. These errors can mean that the optical illusion is broken and that the discreet colours become visible. One method of reducing and quantifying error is Registration


Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) inks when printed separately.

In typography, a font or typeface is a coordinated set of glyphs designed with stylistic unity. A typeface usually comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks; it may also include ideograms and symbols, or consist entirely of them, for example, mathematical or map-making symbols. The term typeface is often conflated with font, a term which, historically, had a number of distinct meanings before the advent of desktop publishing; these terms are now effectively synonymous when discussing digital typography. A helpful and still valid distinction between font and typeface is a font's status as a discrete commodity with legal restrictions, while typeface designates a visual appearance or style not immediately reducible to any one foundry's production or proprietary control.
The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers, and often typographers. In digital typography, type designers are also known as font developers or font designers.
The size of typefaces and fonts is traditionally measured in points; point has been defined differently at different times, but now the most popular is the Desktop Publishing Point. Font size is also commonly measured in millimeters (mm) and inches.Serif
Serif, or "roman", typefaces are named for the features at the ends of their strokes. Times Roman and Garamond are common examples of serif typefaces. Serif fonts are probably the most used class in printed materials, including most books, newspapers and magazines.
"Roman" and "oblique" are also terms used to differentiate between upright and italic variations of a typeface.

Sans-serif
Sans-serif designs appeared relatively recently in the history of type design. The two-line English so-called "Egyptian" font, released in 1816 by the William Caslon foundry in England apparently produced the first specimen. Sans-serif fonts are commonly but not exclusively used for display typography such as signage, headings, and other situations demanding visual clarity rather than high readability. The text on web pages offers an exception: it appears mostly in sans-serif font because serifs often detract from readability at the low resolution of displays.
The best-known sans-serif font is Max Miedinger's Helvetica, with others such as Futura, Gill Sans, Univers and Frutiger remaining popular over many decades. Arial is a widely-used sans-serif font based on Helvetica, with minor simplifications in the glyphs for improved rendering on computer displays.

Script
Script typefaces simulate handwriting or calligraphy. They do not lend themselves to quantities of body text, as people find them harder to read than many serif and sans-serif typefaces; they are typically used for logos or invitations. Examples include Coronet and Zapfino.

Blackletter
Main article: Blackletter
Blackletter fonts, the earliest typefaces used with the invention of the printing press, resemble the blackletter calligraphy of that time. Many people refer to them as gothic script. Various forms exist including textualis, rotunda, schwabacher, and fraktur.

Display
Display typefaces are used exclusively for decorative purposes, and are not suitable for body text. They have the most distinctive designs of all fonts, and may even incorporate pictures of objects, animals, etc. into the character designs. They usually have very specific characteristics (e.g. evoking the Wild West, Christmas, horror films, etc.) and hence very limited uses.

Monospaced
Monospaced fonts are typefaces in which every glyph is the same width (as opposed to variable-width fonts, where the "w" and "m" are wider than most letters, and the "i" is narrower). The first monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed. Their use continued with early computers, which could only display a single font. Although modern computers can display any desired typeface, monospaced fonts are still important for computer programming, terminal emulation, and for laying out tabulated data in plain text documents. Examples of monospaced typefaces are Courier, Prestige Elite, and Monaco.

Symbol
Main article: Dingbat
Symbol, or Dingbat, typefaces consist of symbols (such as decorative bullets, clock faces, railroad timetable symbols, CD-index, or TV-channel enclosed numbers) rather than normal text characters. Examples include Zapf Dingbats, Sonata, and Wingdings.

Faux
Faux, or simulated, fonts are typefaces in which the font is made to look like characters of another writing system, typically Latin characters made using the style of another script. Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and Sanskrit are all readily available in faux fonts.