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Print Technology Warehouse - Printing glossary Category: Agriculture and Industry > Printing Date & country: 15/12/2007, UK Words: 1575

Reflection copy
Original copy viewed or photographed by light that reflects off its surface.

Refractiveness
A measure of how much a sheet of paper deflects the light that hits it. The more light a sheet deflects, the greater its refractive- ness, allowing a printed image to be more brilliant and detailed. see also brightness, whiteness.

Register
A term in pressure sensitive label production that describes exact, corresponding placement of successively printed images and/or successively die-cut pressure sensitive labels.

Registration
The act of aligning separate printing plates so that they overprint the correct area of paper on the presses.

Registration marks
Crosses and target marks outside printable area of a document - usually on film - to make the registration process easier.

Relative Humidity
Balance the relative humidity of the pressroom compared to the relative humidity of the paper to be printed. Relative humidity is a measure of how much moisture air or paper can hold versus how much it is actually holding at a given temperature. Before printing a job, the printer must 'cure' the paper by letting it sit, wrapped, in the pressroom fo…

Release
The force required to remove the release liner from the facestock at a specified speed and angle.

Release Coat
Release lacquer. The release liner treatment material that allows pressure-sensitive labels to release from the release liner.

Release Liner
Backing. Liner lining. The portion of the label that receives the release coating. Prior to application, it protects the adhesive and provides support for the facestock during the die cutting operation and allows the label to be transported to a label applicator or through a computer printer.

Relief
A method for printing ink on paper, using type of images that rise above the surface of the printing plate. Ink sits on top of these raised surfaces, and as the paper is pressed onto them it picks up ink. Letterpress, flexography, and rubber stamps all use relief plates. In letterpress, intense pressure can cause images to be slightly debossed or d…

Relief plate
Printing plate with a raised image-bearing surface. Letterpress and photoengraving use relief plates.

Removability
A relative term to describe the force or condition under which a P.S. label can be removed from a substrate. A removable label is one in which no damage or staining occurs to the substrate or face material and no adhesive residue is left on the substrate upon removal.

Removable Adhesive
A pressure-sensitive adhesive characterized by low ultimate adhesion to a wide variety of surfaces, which can be removed without damage to either the label or the substrate.

Repeat
The printing length of a plate cylinder, determined by one revolution of the plate cylinder gear.

Resampling
Process of reducing the amount of colour information/size of a scanned image or illustration.

Residue
Adhesive left on a substrate when a label is removed.

Resilience
Capability of a sealer, coating or paper to return to its original size and shape after deformation.

Resin
A generic term referring to the materials used by paper manufactures to 'size' paper. Rosin, a natural resin from pine trees, is used in the manufacture of acidic paper. Synthetic resins are used in the manufacture of alkaline and acid-free papers.

Resist
Stencil hardened by light and used on printing plates to prevent etching of non-printing areas.

Resolution
When referring to output devices, resolution is a measure of the sharpness with which pages are created. Measured in dots per inch, the greater the number of dots, the more smoother and cleaner appearance the character/image will have.

Rest in Proportion (RIP)
An instruction when giving sizes to artwork or photographs that other parts of the artwork are to be enlarged or reduced in proportion.

Retouching
A means of altering or modifying artwork or photographs with Photoshop, paint, dye, pencil, airbrush or other media or colour separations to correct faults or enhance the image.

Reverse
When an original black image is reproduced white and vice-versa.

Revise
Indicates the stages at which corrections have been incorporated from earlier proofs and new proofs submitted. E.g. First revise, second revise.

Rewind Slit
A slitting process where a roll of tape is unwound and run through a set of shear or score knives to be slit and then wound up into individual rolls.

RGB
Red Green Blue, the colours used by a computer monitor to create colour images on the screen. When all three colours are combined over each other the colour of light is white. Also known as the primary colours.

Rich black
A 'black' area of a page to be output which also includes some process colours - usually 30% Cyan - in order to make it appear deeper or to match it to other page elements.

Right reading
A positive or negative which reads from left to right.

RIP
Raster image processor: part of a printer that converts page description information into a bitmap and sends it to the print mechanism.

Rivers
Unsightly gaps running vertically within text, usually when it is set fully justified in narrow columns.

Rockwell hardness
A method of determining the surface hardness of a substance. Degree of hardness.

Roll-to-roll
A method of running materials through a printing machine. A roll of material is fed into a printing unit, is printed, and then is rewound into a roll as it exits the machine.

Roll-to-sheet
A method of running material through a printing machine. A roll or material is fed into a printing unit, then is sheeted as it exits the printing machine.

Roman
Type that has vertical stems as distinct from italics or oblique that are set at angles.

Rosette
The formation created by the dots that make up four-colour images. The dots, in magenta (red), cyan (blue), yellow, and black, overlap each other in a cluster. Because the dots are not perfectly round, and because they are turned at angles to each other, this cluster resembles the arrangement of petals in a rose.

Rosin
A natural resin from pine trees, used to size acidic paper.

Rotary engraving
Engraving that is done with a rotating tool or cutter in a motorized spindle. The process is similar to routing and is used to produce cuts of specified widths and depths in a wide variety of materials.

Rotary press
A web or reel fed printing press which uses a curved printing plate mounted on the plate cylinder.

Rotary printing
Accomplished by means of a cylindrical impression cylinder and a cylindrical printing plate.

Rotogravure
Gravure printing on a web-fed press.

Rough
A preliminary sketch of a proposed design.

Rough proof
A galley proof.

Royal
A size of printing paper 20in x 25in (508 x 635mm).

Rubber Base Adhesive
A pressure-sensitive adhesive based on natural or synthetic rubbers.

Rubber plate
Flexible relief plate made from rubber and used in flexography.

Rubbing
When printed ink appears dry but does not resist surface rubbing or abrasion - also called scuffing.

Rubylith
Red-masking material opaque to light, which is used to mask out areas that need to remain, unexposed to light.

Ruler
Rulers displayed on screen that show measures in inches, picas, pixels, points, centimetres or millimetres.

Run-around
The ability within a program to run text around a graphic image within a document, without the need to adjust each line manually.

Runability
The ease with which a paper moves through a printing press. For example, offset lithography puts more stress on paper than other printing processes because of: how the paper moves through the press; the great amount of water used in the process; and the tackiness of the inks that are used. In order to have good runnability, paper for offset printin…

Running head
A line of - usually small - type at the top of a page that repeats a heading.

Running register
That control on a flexographic press, which accurately positions, while in the run mode, the printing of each colour station in the direction of the web travel. Also called circumferential register or longitudinal register.

Saddle stitched
A method of binding a magazine that involves the pages being stitched together over a saddle shaped support with wire, which is later cut and bent across the middle pages. The result is a publication that appears to have been stapled together. Usually limited to 64 pages size. Traditionally performed on V shaped saddle. Many magazines are saddle st…

Sandwich construction
Panels composed of a lightweight core material to which two relatively thin, dense, high strength faces or skins are adhered.

Sans serif
Category of typeface design lacking the small finishing strokes that provide letter-to-letter transitions. Sans serif typefaces often have more impact at large size because of their design simplicity.

Saturation
Measure of the strength of a colour.

Sawtooth edge
Edge of a halftone that angles across the line of its screen - the pixels look like the teeth of a saw.

Scale
Increasing or reducing the size of a text or graphic element white retaining the proportion, or height-to-width ratio of the original also the means, within a page layout or graphics application, to reduce or enlarge the amount of space an image will occupy.

Scaleable artwork
Vector art, the type of illustration produced by software such as Illustrator, Corel Draw and Freehand. Because the files describe the shape of the images by mathematical formulae, rather than exact pixels, they are, like Postscript, resolution independent.

Scaling
A means of calculating the amount of enlargement or reduction necessary to accommodate a photograph within the area of a design.

Scamp
A sketch of a design showing the basic concept.

Scan
Convert photographs, 35mm or 6 x 6 trannies into digital files that can be placed into a publication. Precise cropping and resizing originals is simple, and is the necessary first-step towards other photo manipulation techniques, such as adjusting tonal values and colour castes.

Scanner
An electronic device used in the making of colour and tone corrected colour separations.

Schematic
Drawing showing relationships between various pages of a Web site. Used in the planning stages and to double-check that all pages are correctly linked.

SCK (Super-calendered Kraft)
A bleached, white paper used as a release liner with most standard roll label products.

Score
Crease a sheet of paper or board so it will not be damaged or crack when folded. Essential on weights of 170gsm and above.

Score cut
See score.

Scoring
Pressing a channel into a sheet of paper to allow it to fold more easily. Scoring and pressing the paper fibers together creates an embossed channel that does two things: acts as a guide for easier folding, and creates a hinge that keeps the fiber stretch short. The score should run parallel to the paper grain; the thicker the paper, the wider the …

Scraperboard
A board prepared with black indian ink over a china clay surface. Scraping away the ink to expose the china clay surface produces drawings.

Screen
The lined glass, now called contact film, through which images are photographed to create halftones. Shooting through the mesh of a screen breaks an image into tiny dots. The closer the lines of the screen, the smaller the dots and the more dots per inch; the farther apart the lines of the screen, the bigger the dots and the fewer the dots per inch…

Screen angle
In printing continuous tones (e.g. colours and greyscales) are simulated by patterns of dots, called screens. The rows of dots are applied at different angles less noticeable to the eye. In four colour printing these angles are: Black 45°, Cyan 105°, Magenta 75° and Yellow 90°

Screen Clash
See Moire.

Screen finder
Transparent template that determines the correct screen ruling for a halftone.

Screen Printing
A printing process also called silk screening, where ink is transferred through a porous screen, such as nylon, onto the surface to be decorated. An emulsion or stencil is used to block out the negative, or non-printing areas of the screen. A squeegee forces ink through the open areas of the screen and onto the paper, plastic, cardboard, wood, fabr…

Script
A typeface designed to look like handwriting.

Scrolls
Long sheets of papyrus or parchment rolled for storage.

SCSI
Small Computer System Interface: “scuzzy�. Peripheral connection interface for hard drives, scanners, CD-burners and mass storage devices for personal computers. Each item has a number for an 'address'. Operates on a 'daisy chain' principal.

Scumming
Printing problem that occurs when the non-image area of a plate accepts ink in random areas.

Sealer
Continuous film that prevents the passage of liquids or gaseous media: a high-bodied adhesive generally of low cohesive strength to fill voids of various sizes to prevent passage of liquid or gaseous media.

Secondary colour
The colour that results when primary colours are mixed in equal proportions.

Secondary colours
Created by mixing the primary colours, making orange, green, and purple. These offer Lots more opportunities for creative expression and effects.

Section
A printed sheet folded to make a multiple of pages.

Section mark (§)
A character used at the beginning of a new section. Also used as a footnote symbol.

Security paper
Paper incorporating special features (dyes, watermarks etc) for use on cheques.

Self-adhesive label
See pressure-sensitive label.

Self-cover
Using the same paper on the cover of a publication as on the inside.

Self-wound
A roll of material with a single liner, which is coated on both sides with a release coating and a carrier having a pressure-sensitive adhesive on both sides. Also a material that has pressure-sensitive adhesive applied to one side and then rolled up on itself (no liner).

Semi-chemical pulping
Using chemicals and mechanical grinding to separate the cellulose fibers of wood. Because this pulping process doesn't remove lignin, it isn't generally used for fine printing and writing papers. It's used instead for papers not requiring permanence.

Separation
The technique used when printing colour documents - it refers to dividing colour documents into the four-process colours cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, which can be used to recreate every colour within the CMYK gamut.

Serif
The curls and points that appear as outward lateral extensions of the bottoms and tops of letterforms on some typefaces. Many designers consider serif type used for body text for easy readability. Times Roman is a well-known serif type font.

Service Bureau
The facility that provides professional services to graphics and printing professionals especially related to computer output. (i.e. plate ready film, matchprints, colourkeys, etc...)

Service Temperature
The temperature range that a PS label will withstand after a 24-hour residence time on the substrate. The range is expressed in degrees Fahrenheit.

Set
The interval of time required for adhesive bonding; relative bonding speed of an adhesive material.

Set off
The accidental transfer of the printed image from one sheet to the back of another.

Set size
The width of the type body of a given point size.

Set solid
Type set without leading (line spacing) between the lines. Type is often set with extra space; e.g. 9 point set on 10 point.

Set-off
See Offset.

Shade
The colour depth and hue in comparison to papers that are the same colour; also used to describe the colour achieved by adding dye to pulp slurry. There is a wide shade variety in white papers, as well as in coloured papers.

Shadow
3D effect created by illustration programs creating the illusion that text or graphic object is standing vertically and illuminated from the top or side, creating a background below and behind it.

Sharpen
Making the print dot sizes smaller on films using contact printing techniques and exposure manipulation. Plates can sharpen due to wear.