The Glossary – PrintReady.ca

Similar to every industry, when dealing with a print shop and/or a graphic designer, you will run into some language that won’t totally make sense, or just go right over your head. Below is a compilation of some of the terms you could run headlong into, with a little description to help you in dealing with them. Some terms may be used primarily by your graphic designer, some by your print shop, and some will cross between the two. If you find a term that isn’t listed here, or have problems figuring some of these out, you can email me at jason@printready.ca and I will try and help.

*Note: This is a work in progress. I will be adding more as time goes on. It by no means includes every term that printers or graphic designers use, nor is it meant to. Some things you may not run across and some you simply don’t need to worry about.

Fonts

Typeface icon

Typefaces, letters. The style of lettering that makes up the words on the page. There are thousands of type styles available, some coming with your computer, some that you can buy online, or some that are available free, either with software you install or download from the internet. Some of the words you will hear along with ‘font’ are ‘serif’, ‘sans-serif’ and ‘script’. These are sub-categories of typefaces, referring to the general style of the type.

Vector

When making digital designs, there are 2 primary types of artwork; vector and bitmap. Vector (or curves) artwork is created with tools like Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw and others, using lines and shapes created by, well, math. You can tell artwork is vector usually by zooming in on it or blowing it up and it will still remain sharp and clear. Vector artwork is handy if you want to print many different size items, since you can enlarge it for a poster or a banner and it will print properly. And because most high quality printers also handle vectors directly, even smaller sizes may print cleaner.

Bitmap

Bitmap artwork is artwork created with tools like Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Paint and many other programs that use pixels instead of math to make your images. Your digital camera creates bitmaps when it takes a picture, and bitmaps have been around since the beginning of computer graphics. The downside to bitmap files is that they are limited in the size you can print.

PDF

Portable Document Format is a file format that rolls your file up into a universally read document that retains its formatting when printing to different devices. Most, if not all, printing companies can handle, if not prefer, files submitted by their customers in this format.

Press Ready

A term that refers to your artwork being of high enough quality for printing, along with being setup for proper finishing. A ‘press’ in this scenario can be a high quality ink jet, commercial laser printer or even an actual press. This includes your included photos have to be high enough quality to print clearly, your typefaces being ’embedded’ or ‘converted to curves’ so they can be printed properly by those who do not own the typefaces, and printers marks (especially crop/cut marks) and artwork bleeds.

Bleed, Crop Marks

When your file includes artwork that goes off the edge of the page (a background for example), you should leave it to ‘hang over the edge’. Crop marks indicate the finished size of the artwork. After artwork is printed on a page, it is cut down to the crop marks for size.

Duplex

When your printer prints on both sides of the same sheet of paper. While you can manually ‘duplex’ by printing on one side, taking your page, flipping it and printing the second side, it’s not ideal. One reason is that if you are printing something that needs to line up front to back, you have better odds your artwork will match up if the printer does the flipping itself (depending on the make/model of the printer).