Glossary

An additive color model involves light emitted directly from a source or illuminant of some sort. The additive reproduction process usually uses red, green and blue light to produce the other colors. See also RGB color model. Combining one of these additive primary colors with another in equal amounts produces the additive secondary colors cyan, magenta, and yellow. Combining all three primary lights (colors) in equal intensities produces white.

The space between columns within a page. Not to be confused with the gutter, which is the combination of the inside margins of two facing pages.

In typography, an ascender is the portion of a minuscule letter in a Latin-derived alphabet that extends above the mean line of a font. That is, the part of a lower-case letter that is taller than the font's x-height. Ascenders, together with descenders, increase the recognizability of words. For this reason, British road signs no longer use all capital letters.

The Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) is a unique identification number assigned by Amazon.com and its partners for product identification within the Amazon.com organization. Each product sold on Amazon.com is given a unique ASIN. For books with 10-digit ISBN, the ASIN and the ISBN are the same. Books without an ISBN and other products are also assigned ASINs. ASINs are also used for other items used by Amazon.com (and subsidiaries), such as businesses in the yellow pages (on A9.com) and OpenSearch feeds.

In typography and penmanship, the baseline is the line upon which most letters "sit" and below which descenders extend. For example 'aeiou' all sit on the baseline letter 'p' has a descender and goes below the baseline.

Bleed is a printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming. The bleed is the part on the side of your document that gives the printer that small amount of space to move around paper and design inconsistencies. Bleeds in the USA and UK generally are 1/8 of an inch from where the cut is to be made. Bleeds in Europe generally are 3 to 5mm from where the cut is to be made. This can vary from print company to print company. Some printers ask for specific sizes.

Internet bots, also known as web robots, are software scripts that run automated tasks. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers.

A byte is a basic unit of measurement of information storage in computer science. In many computer architectures it is a unit of memory addressing. There is no standard but a byte most often consists of eight bits. A byte is an ordered collection of bits, with each bit denoting a single binary value of 1 or 0. The byte most often consists of 8 bits in modern systems; however, the size of a byte can vary and is generally determined by the underlying computer operating system or hardware.

In typography, cap height refers to the height of a capital letter above the baseline for a particular typeface.[1] It specifically refers to the height of capital letters that are flat—such as H or I—as opposed to round letters such as O, or pointed letters like A, both of which may display overshoot. The height of the small letters is referred to as x-height.

A Content Management System (CMS) is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated media). It facilitates content creation, access control, editing, and essential Web maintenance functions. The software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease.
Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, or artifacts that might be needed by the system. A presentation layer displays the content to Web-site visitors based on a set of templates. Administration is typically done through browser-based interfaces, but some systems require the use of a fat client.
Unlike Web-site builders, a Web based CMS allows non-technical users to make changes to a website with little training. It typically requires an experienced coder to set up and add features, but is primarily a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators

To reproduce full-color photographic images, typical printing presses use 4 colors of ink. The four inks are placed on the paper in layers of dots that combine to create the illusion of many more colors. CMYK refers to the 4 ink colors used by the printing press -- the the subtractive primaries plus black.

Color depth or bit depth, is a computer graphics term describing the number of bits used to represent the color of a single pixel in a bitmapped image or video frame buffer. This concept is also known as bits per pixel (bpp), particularly when specified along with the number of bits used. Higher color depth gives a broader range of distinct colors.

Copyright gives the author of an original work exclusive right for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a medium.

Copywriting is the use of words, or act of writing words, to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. The purpose of marketing copy, or promotional text, is to persuade the reader, listener or viewer to act — for example, to buy a product or subscribe to a certain viewpoint. Commonly confused with "Copyrighting" which is the act of securing exclusive rights to use content for a certain time period.

One of the 4 colors used in 4-color (CMYK) printing and inkjet printer cartridges, cyan is a blue-green or turquoise color. Cyan is one of subtractive primaries, magenta and yellow being the other two. Combine the additive primaries of blue and green and you get cyan.

In typography, a descender is the portion of a letter in a Latin alphabet that extends below the baseline of a font. For example, in the letter y, the descender would be the "tail," or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the v created by the two lines converging. In the letter p at right, it is the stem reaching down past the o.

A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character". The term continued to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that had symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters.

An em is a unit of measurement in the field of typography, equal to the point size of the current font. This unit is not defined in terms of any specific typeface, and thus is the same for all fonts at a given point size. So, 1 em in a 16 point typeface is 16 points.

An en is a typographic unit, half of the width of an em. By definition, it is equivalent to half of the height of the font (e.g. in 16 point type it is 8 points). As its name suggests, it is also traditionally the width of a lowercase letter "n".

In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface. For example, the set of all characters for 9-point Bulmer italic is a font, and the 10-point size would be a separate font, as would the 9 point upright. The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface, or italic type.

A glyph is an element of writing. Two or more glyphs representing the same symbol, whether interchangeable or context-dependent, are called allographs; the abstract unit they are variants of is called a grapheme or character. Glyphs may also be ligatures, that is, compound characters, or diacritics.

In typeface anatomy, a hairline is the thinnest stroke found in a specific typeface that consists of strokes of varying widths. Hairline is often used to refer to a hairline rule, the thinnest graphic rule (line) printable on a specific output device. Hair or hairline is also a type of serif, the minimum thickness for a serif.

Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size or in spacing. Halftone can also be used to refer specifically to the image that is produced by this process. Where continuous tone imagery contains an infinite range of colors or grays, the halftone process reduces visual reproductions to a binary image that is printed with only one color of ink. This binary reproduction relies on a basic optical illusion—that these tiny halftone dots are blended into smooth tones by the human eye.

In typography, italic type refers to cursive typefaces based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. The influence from calligraphy can be seen in their usual slight slanting to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy.

In typesetting, justification (can also be referred to as 'full justification') is the typographic alignment setting of text or images within a column or "measure" to align along both the left and right margin. Text set this way is said to be "justified".

In justified text, the spaces between words, and, to a lesser extent, between glyphs or letters (kerning), are stretched or sometimes compressed in order to make the text align with both the left and right margins. When using justification, it is customary to treat the last line of a paragraph separately by left or right aligning it, depending on the language direction. Lines in which the spaces have been stretched beyond their normal width are called loose lines, while those whose spaces have been compressed are called tight lines.

A kilobit is an expression of grouped bits meaning 1,000 (103) bits. The term 'kilobit' is most commonly used in the expression of data rates (digital communication speeds) in the abbreviated form "kbps", "kb/s"[2], or "kbit/s", meaning "kilobits per second". For example, "a 56 kbit/s PSTN", or "a 512 kbit/s broadband Internet connection". The abbreviation kb (for kilobit) should not be confused with the abbreviation of the term kilobyte (abbreviated to kB or KB, with an upper case B).

Kilobyte (derived from the SI prefix "kilo-", meaning 1,000) is a unit of digital information storage equal to either 1,000 bytes (103) or 1,024 bytes (210), depending on context. It is abbreviated in a number of ways: KB, kB, K and Kbyte. Kilobyte (abbreviated as "KB") is not to be confused with the term kilobit (abbreviated as kb).

In typography, kerning—less commonly, mortising (referring to the process of physically removing material from the cast character)—is the process of adjusting letter spacing in a proportional font. In a well-kerned font, the two-dimensional blank spaces between each pair of letters all have similar area.

In typography, letter-spacing, also called tracking, refers to the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in a line or block of text. Letter-spacing can be confused with kerning. Letter-spacing refers to the overall spacing of a word or block of text affecting its overall density and texture. Kerning is a term applied specifically to the adjustment of spacing of two particular characters to correct visually uneven spacing.

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more type characters are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line.

In typography, Line spacing or Leading refers to the amount of added vertical spacing between lines of type. Line spacing may sometimes be confused with tracking, which refers to the horizontal spacing between letters or characters.

One of the 4 ink colors used in 4-color (CMYK) printing and inkjet printing, magenta is a pinkish shade of red. It is one of the subtractive primaries, the other two being yellow and cyan.

A megapixel (MP) is 1 million pixels, and is a term used not only for the number of pixels in an image, but also to express the number of image sensor elements of digital cameras or the number of display elements of digital displays. For example, a camera with an array of 2048×1536 sensor elements is commonly said to have "3.1 megapixels" (2048 × 1536 = 3,145,728).

Oblique type (or slanted, sloped) is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used in the same manner as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except distorted. Oblique fonts are usually associated with sans-serif typefaces, especially with geometric faces, as opposed to humanist ones whose design tends to draw more on history. Oblique and italic type are often confused by non-designers.

A paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page/column. A word, part of a word or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph. Orphans result in too much white space between paragraphs or at the bottom of a page.

A pica is a typographic unit of measure corresponding to 1/72nd of a foot, and therefore to 1/6th of an inch. The pica contains 12 point units of measure. Usually, pica measurements are represented with an upper-case "P" with an upper-right-to-lower-left virgule (slash) starting in the upper right portion of the "P" and ending at the lower left of the upright portion of the "P"; essentially drawing a virgule ( / ) through a "P". Likewise, points are represented with number of points before a lower-case "p", for example, 5p represents "5 points", and 6P2p represents "6 picas and 2 points", and 1P1 represents "13 points".

See "px".

In typography, a point is the smallest unit of measure, being a subdivision of the larger pica. It is commonly abbreviated as pt. The traditional printer's point, from the era of hot metal typesetting and press work, varied between 0.18 and 0.4 mm depending on various definitions of the foot. Today, the traditional point has been supplanted by the desktop publishing point (also called the PostScript point), which has been rounded to an even 72 points to the inch (1 point = 127⁄360 mm = 352.7 µm). In either system, there are 12 points to the pica.

In digital imaging, a pixel (or picture element) is the smallest item of information in an image. Pixels are normally arranged in a 2-dimensional grid, and are often represented using dots, squares, or rectangles. Each pixel is a sample of an original image, where more samples typically provide more-accurate representations of the original. The intensity of each pixel is variable; in color systems, each pixel has typically three or four components such as red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

In typographic terms a quad, or em-quad, represents a square block with dimensions of one em on each side.

Rasterization is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format (shapes) and converting it into a raster image (pixels or dots) for output on a video display or printer, or for storage in a bitmap file format. In normal usage, the term refers to the popular rendering algorithm for displaying three-dimensional shapes on a computer. Rasterization is currently the most popular technique for producing real-time 3D computer graphics. Real-time applications need to respond immediately to user input, and generally need to produce frame rates of at least 25 frames per second to achieve smooth animation.

Reprography is the reproduction of graphics through mechanical or electrical means, such as photography or xerography. Reprography is commonly used in catalogs and archives, as well as in the architectural, engineering, and construction industries.

The RGB color model is an additive color model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additive primary colors, red, green, and blue. The main purpose of the RGB color model is for the sensing, representation, and display of images in electronic systems, such as televisions and computers, though it has also been used in conventional photography.

In typography, rivers, or rivers of white, are visually unattractive gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text. They can occur with any spacing, though they are most noticeable with wide interword spaces caused by either full text justification or monospaced fonts. A less-frequently-used term is a lake, which refers to a cluster of adjacent or intertwined rivers that create a lighter area in the midst of a block of type.

In typography, a sans-serif or sans serif typeface is one that does not have the small features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without". In print, sans-serif fonts are more typically used for headlines than for body text.[1] The conventional wisdom holds that serifs help guide the eye along the lines in large blocks of text. Sans-serifs, however, have acquired considerable acceptance for body text in Europe.

In typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface that has serifs is called a serif typeface (or seriffed typeface). A typeface without serifs is called sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning “without”. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" (in German "grotesk") or "Gothic," and serif types as "Roman."

A subscript is a number, figure, symbol, or indicator that appears smaller than the normal line of type and is set slightly below it – subscripts appear at or below the baseline. Subscripts are perhaps best known for their use in formulas, mathematical expressions, and descriptions of chemical compounds or isotopes, but have many other uses as well.

A subtractive color model explains the mixing of paints, dyes, inks, and natural colorants to create a range of colors, where each such color is caused by the mixture absorbing some wavelengths of light and reflecting others. The color that an opaque object appears to have is based on what parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are reflected by it, or by what parts of the spectrum are not absorbed.

A superscript is a number, figure, symbol, or indicator that appears smaller than the normal line of type and is set slightly above it. Superscripts are perhaps best known for their use in formulas, mathematical expressions, and descriptions of chemical compounds or isotopes, but have many other uses as well.

In typography, a typeface is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs. 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.

Typography (Etymology: typos—type, graphos—written) is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration technique. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning).

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 100,000 characters, a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering and bidirectional display order.

Vector graphics are a resolution-independent, scalable format composed of individual objects made up of mathematical calculations. Vector images can be resized easily without loss of quality making them an ideal format for initial design of logos and illustrations that to be used at multiple sizes.

In page layout, illustration and sculpture, white space is often referred to as negative space. It is that portion of a page left unmarked: the space between graphics, margins, gutters, space between columns, space between lines of type or figures and objects drawn or depicted. The term arises from graphic design practice, where printing processes generally use white paper.

A paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page/column, thus separated from the remainder of the text.

An acronym for What You See Is What You Get, the term is used in the computing world to describe an editor that display content in a similar manner to the final output. The editor typically mimics the basic operation of traditional word processing programs and can apply font and layout styles to online content.

In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the distance between the baseline and the mean line in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the letter x in the font (which is where the terminology came from), as well as the u, v, w, and z. (Curved letters such as a, c, e, m, n, o, r and s tend to exceed the x-height slightly, due to overshoot.) However, in modern typography, the x-height is simply a design characteristic of the font, and while an x is usually exactly one x-height in height, in some more decorative or script designs, this may not always be the case.

The eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) is one programming language in which web pages are written. It a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely used Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).