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Full Service Print Center

Glossary

This is a basic list of words that may help understand printing terminology.
Gamut: The total range of colors produced by a device.
Gate fold: A fold in which the sides are brought together in the center or overlapped.
Gathering: Assembling sheets of paper and signatures into their proper sequence; Reference: collating.
Ghost: When an image is screened back or shaded down in intensity, it is called a ghosted image. Both full-color and black and white images can be ghosted.
Gloss: A highly callipered coating on a paper is called a gloss finish. Coated papers allow very little ink absorption and offer excellent color definition. Other coated paper finishes are Matte, Dull, and Silk
Glyph: The components of a font outline or shape (a stroke, an accent, etc.).
Gradation: A smooth transition between black and white, one color and another, or color and the lack of it.
Grain: The extent to which an overall granulated patterning appears in a photograph, due to chemical  and physical characteristics of the film, paper or development process.
Grain (Paper): The Grain of paper referres to the direction the grains flow in milling the stock. Wrong grain direction can affect the quality of the final printed product.
Graphic Accents: Graphic Accents emphasize and organize words, illustrations and photographs. Boxes, drop shadows, indents, lines, rules, screens and icons are considered graphic accents.
Gray Scale: The tonal range from a very light gray (1% dot) up to solid black (100% dot) in increments of 1%. Or, when an image has "shading" or "screening" it is referred to as a gray scale image.
Gray scale: The range of gray tones between black and white. A gray scale monitor is able to display distinct gray pixels as well as black and white ones, but not color pixels.
Grid: A graphical layout for the design of pages of a book or other document. Variations on pages must match divisions in the grid.
Gripper edge: The leading edge of paper as it passes through a printing press. This area of the sheet can not be printed on.
Groundwood: Low cost papers such as newsprint made by the mechanical pulping process as opposed to  chemical pulping and refining.
Gutter: The blank space of inner margin from printing area to binding, or the space between columns of text in a page layout.
Halftone: The reproduction of continuous-tone artwork such as photography or pencil sketches, through a digital screening process which converts shaded images into solid ink dots of various sizes and concentrations. A few, tiny dots will produce highlight areas. A heavy concentration of large dots will produce mid-tone and shadow areas.
Hand fold: Any fold that must be done completely or partially by hand.
Handing Indent: Hanging indent is when copy is indented to the left of the rest of the paragraph. Bulleted items are visually most effective when they use hanging indents.
Hard Copy: A laser copy of the stored data on a disk, usually black and white, color print out when necessary.
Header: The information about a publication; such as its title, date, issue, or page number is a header when is consistently appears at the top of each page of the document.
Heavey Ink Coverage: When over 30% of a sheet has ink coverage on it, the order is considered to have heavy ink coverage.
Highlight: The lightest part of an image.
House Stock or Sheets: Selected grades and sizes of paper that we carry in inventory.
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is a formatting language used for documents on the World Wide Web. HTML files are plain text files with formatting codes that tell browsers such as the Netscape Navigator how to display text, position graphics and form items, and display links to other pages.
Hue, Saturation, Lightness: The three attributes of color. Hue refers to the name of a color; saturation is color intensity; lightness (also called brightness) is the degree of lightness or darkness.