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Computer and Print Shop Terms You Should Know

At Sundance Printing we never want you to feel stupid. In fact, if it's any consolation, I had to do a bit of research before I could come up with some of these definitions. It's really not stupidity, anyway... it's merely a case of lack of exposure. After all, you have your own business to worry about -- probably with lots of words we couldn't define or even spell very well. But if you are responsible for any printing, then this terminology will help you understand most of what goes on at a print shop. The important part, anyway.

Print Shop Terms

Gripper: The "gripper" is the space at the top of the sheet that is needed for the press to grab the sheet of paper and pull it through the press. The gripper area cannot be printed on. So when your printer is laying out your sheet, they need to consider the non-print area at the top. This only becomes a problem if you are trying to cover the whole sheet with ink. The typical non-print area ranges from 1/4 to 3/8 of an inch.
Halftone: This is the final piece of art your printer needs to print your photograph. Halftones are sometimes referred to as a dot screen -- the words are interchangeable. A printer needs to scan the photo and create a bitmap image with photo editing software. This takes your photo, which is a continuous tone (for photography buffs), and makes it into dots so the press can print it.
Line Copy: When a printer says line copy, he or she means the words that are on the sheet of paper you want to print.
Polyester Plates: Poly plates are just one of many methods printers use to print your job. But the two most commonly used methods today are poly plates (what we are defining here) and metal plates (what we will define next). The advantage of using poly plates is that they are cheaper for the printer to use so you save money. And because they are easier to use, you get your jobs quicker than ever before. The poly plate is thrown away after every use which allows you to make constant revisions to your printed piece. And it doesn't change the price. (Of course, if you ask your printer to make the changes, they will charge you a typesetting fee. But the printing cost remains the same.)

On the other hand, the disadvantage of poly plates is that the plates stretch over long use, which makes registering jobs difficult. (See "registration" further in this list.) Because the plate is thrown away after every use, every reprint job will come out a little different. It used to be that photos didn't reproduce as well as with metal plates, but with advances in computer technology there is virtually no difference now.
Metal Plates: Metal plates are the other method printers typically use to print your job. This is an old method whereby the printer must shoot negatives first, then strip the job and plate it. (See "stripping" further in this list.) Metal plates give you a superb quality print job. The advantage of metal plates is that once you have paid for the negatives, stripping and plating, every subsequent print job costs less than a paper plate. This is a great method for long runs in which the copy doesn't change. Also, the plate is exactly the same on every run so your print job looks exactly the same every time.

The disadvantage of using metal plates is that once the job is plated, if you want to change just one word you have to pay to have it all redone. Typically it takes a printer longer to do this because it involves so many more steps. The other disadvantage is cost. Negatives, stripping and plating are only utilized when a printer uses metal plates. These steps are not done when a printer uses paper plates. It's easy to see why it costs a little more for metal plates than it does for paper plates.
Negatives: Printers are referring to the film that is required to burn the metal plate for your print job. Negatives are the reverse of your printed piece.
Registration: On a properly printed piece, all of the colors are arranged on the page in exactly the same way. If the colors are not arranged properly, the piece will look odd. You've seen newspaper photos or advertisements where the colors overlap or are in the wrong place? That's due to poor registration. Or if you have a line of type with one word in a different color. That one word may be lower or higher than the rest of the line of words because it uses a different plate than the other color. If the two plates are not lined up exactly, then the registration is poor.
Stripping: This is one of those fun printing words. One time when we were printing a calendar, Wes was talking about the trouble he was having stripping April. Raised a few eyebrows in the lobby! What it really refers to is the process of taking the negative and positioning it on a masking sheet so it can be used to burn the metal plate -- which is called plating. The masking sheet is a ruled piece of paper that allows for the gripper and doesn't let any light through the paper. This process can take a considerable amount of time depending on how detailed your job is. Modern computer technology has replaced the most difficult part of stripping. If you compose a job and give the printer the disk, you have already done 90% of the stripping in your computer. If you did all of the work on your computer, placing text and images, then your printer refers to those negatives that are printed off your disk as "composite negatives." They still need to be stripped for position top to bottom and left to right. But the stripper doesnÕt have to compose the line copy to gether with your photos. Once the job has been stripped and everything is done, some printers refer to this as a flat. You might hear them say, "They stripped your flat." It doesn't mean they stole all of your possessions out of your London apartment. It means everything is ready to go. A flat is printerÕs lingo for a job that has been stripped on a masking sheet and is ready to burn a plate.
Line Screen: A line screen is the frequency of the dot screen a printer uses to create halftones from your photos. Newspapers typically print 85 line halftones. Both the metal and polyester plate process typically use 133 line screen for one and/or two color printing. If you are doing four color printing, your printer can go all the way up to a 400 line screen. This much quality is very expensive. Remember, line screen is only referring to more or fewer dots in your photograph.
Color Seperation: Printers need to separate Color 1 from Color 2 because when they print your job, they can only print one color at a time. Let's say you need to print black and red on your letterhead. Your printer must shoot a plate for the black and another plate for the red. That's why your printer needs separations. And why registration can become difficult.

Computer Terms

EPS (Encapsulated Postscript)

A file format used for line art or drawings (usually created in Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, Corel Draw or some other drawing program.) These are called vector drawings and are made up of lines and curves.

TIFF (Tagged image file format)

A file format used for scans, especially of photographs. These are best used for pictures that need shades of gray or documents created in paint programs such as Painter or Photoshop. These are also referred to as raster images.

JPEG: (pronounced "j-peg")

A file format similar to Tiff but using a compression technology that throws out excess color information. These are best used for photographs that will be reproduced as one-color halftones because they take up less disk space than equivalently sized Tiff files. This is widely used on the world wide web. Images that are downloaded from the internet usually don't have a high enough resolution to be used in your printing. It will make the image look jagged and detract from the overall attractiveness of your piece

DPI (Dots per inch)

This can be confusing because this term is used for the line screen of a halftone and also for the resolution of a printer or imagesetter. It is better to use the term "lines per inch" (lpi) for halftones. Laser printers generally output at 600, 1200, or 1800 dpi. Imagesetters output at 1200, 2400 or even higher dpi. Halftones are generally printed at 85, 100, 120 or 133 lpi. The higher the lpi of your halftone, the more crisp your document is, but also the more space it takes up in your file. You'd want really high dpi output from your printer or imagesetter for things like multi-color brochures or pieces with halftones.

Bit

A contraction of binary digit. The smallest unit of information that a computer can hold. The value of a bit (1 or 0) represents a simple two-way choice, such as on or off, true or false, black or white, and so on.

Byte

A unit of information consisting of a fixed number of bits. One byte usually consists of a series of eight bits, and represents one character (such as a letter, numeral, or punctuation mark).

Kilobyte: A unit of measurement consisting of 1024 bytes.
Megabyte (MB): A unit of measurement equal to 1024 kilobytes or 1,048,576 bytes.
Gigabyte (GB): A unit of measurement equal to 1000 MB.

BMP (Bitmap)

A low quality (72dpi) file format used primarily for clip art. These are characterized by jagged edges. This is also known as a Pict or Pic on Macintosh computers, and Word meta file on PCs

Pixel

Short for "picture element." The visual representation of a bit on the screen (white if the bit is 0, black if it's 1). Also a location in video memory that corresponds to a point on the screen.

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

The "brain" of the computer; the microprocessor that performs the actual computations.

Disk Capacity

The maximum amount of data a disk can hold, usually measured in kilobytes (K) or megabytes (MB). For instance, 3.5-inch floppy disks typically have a disk capacity of 1.4MB. Hard disks can hold from 4 gigabytes to 100 gigabytes, and some even more.

Floppy Disk

A disk made of flexible plastic that stores computer data. This is one of those terms that confuses my father. (Don't get me started about having to explain what his "desktop" is!) He's never actually seen one of the old-time floppy disks that were literally, well . . . floppy. But we still call them that because no one has come up with a better term. Floppy disks aren't really very floppy any more. They used to be very thin but now are housed in a rigid plastic case

Hard Disk

A disk made of metal and permanently sealed into a drive. A hard disk stores very large amounts of information (4 - 100 GB) and operates much faster than a floppy disk and is not removable.

Modem

Short for "modulator/demodulator." A device that links your computer to other computers and information services over telephone lines.

Random-Access Memory (RAM)

Memory in which information can be referred to in an arbitrary or random order. RAM usually means the part of memory available for programs and documents that the computer reads from a disk; the contents of RAM are lost when the computer is turned off.

Read-Only Memory (ROM)

Memory whose contents can be read, but not changed. Information is placed into read-only memory only once, during manufacturing. The contents or ROM are not erased when the computer's power is turned off.

Color Copier Fiery Unit

This is a Rasterized Image Processor (RIP) which processes a computer image so that it can be output by a color copier, which is the mechanism that allows us at Sundance Printing to send your color copies or your black & white copies directly from the computer to be printed out on the copier instead of placing it on the glass.(See "Color and Black & White Copies")

Zip Drive

An attached piece of hardware created by Iomega in 1996 which uses removable disks (zip disks) that hold 100MB, 250MB or 750MB worth of data. This is much more capacity than the old floppy disks.

Writable CD

A drive that can burn data onto a blank CD.

Re-writable CD

A drive that can burn data onto special CDs over and over again like taping your favorite tv show every week onto a videocassette.

GIF

Low resolution image used on web pages and not acceptable for the printing process.

PDF

Short for "Portable Document Format." It's a file format created by Adobe Systems that allows you to create an image that can be read on any computer anywhere using a special program called Acrobat Reader. A PDF is like a photograph in that it can't be altered once you get it developed.