Terms A-B
A
AA Authors Alterations. The term refers to changes (not corrections) made by a client during the proofing process. AA's are normally charged to a client as billable time.
Absolute Colorimetric Absolute Colorimetric is a rendering intent that leaves colors that fall inside the destination gamut unchanged. It does not expand or compress the whole gamut. Each color is transformed into itself, if it exists in the destination gamut. Otherwise, it is transformed to the closest color at the gamut boundary. In short, out of gamut colors get clipped.
Absorbency The capacity of paper to accept liquids like inks.
Accessibility As specified in Section 508 of the 1998 Rehabilitation Act, the process of designing and developing Web sites and other technology that can be navigated and understood by all people, including those with visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive impairments. This type of design also can benefit people with older/slower software and hardware.
Acquire Module Software (created by a scanner manufacturer), that expands the functions of the Adobe Photoshop program.
Acrobat Acrobat is part of a set of applications developed by Adobe to create and view PDF files. Acrobat is used to create the PDF files, and the freeware Acrobat Reader is used to read the PDF files.
Actual weight The true weight of any volume of paper used to determine price.
ADA The Americans with Disabilities Act
Wide-ranging legislation intended to make society more accessible to people with disabilities. As web-based information continues to diversify, it is increasingly important that web pages be designed with consideration for different types of access. Recommendations for universally accessible design can be found at the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) web site at
http://www.cast.orgAdditive Color The additive primary colors are red, blue and green. These three additive colors represent the three main components of white light in the additive color module. Black is produced by the absence of the primary colors. In theory, any color can be created by mixing these three colors.
Additives Additives are ingredients of paper such as clay fillers, sizing, dyes and other chemicals.
Aliasing In graphic design, aliasing occurs when a computer monitor, printer, or graphics file does not have a high enough resolution to represent a graphic image or text. An aliased image is often said to have the "jaggies."
Alignment The positioning of a body of text. Text can be positioned to the left, right, or "center" of a page. For the best, consistent alignment, web site designers use tables and Cascading Style Sheets.
Alkaline Paper The preferred choice for books, maps and documents, alkaline paper is usually used where aging resistance is preferred.
Alpha A fourth color component in the RGB color model that represents opacity. By changing Alpha values, images can be rendered completely transparent to completely opaque.
Alpha channel Alpha channels are used to create and store masks. Masks enable you to isolate or protect parts of an image you want to apply changes to, be it color changes, filters, opacity to a certain area on an image etc.
ALT-attribute Part of the image source tag in HTML. A good web designer will always include text in all of your image sources for two reasons: (1) if any of your visitors choose not to view graphic images on your web pages, the alternative text will be shown; and (2) if your visitors use Internet Explorer as their browser and they leave the mouse over any graphic image, they will view the text in your ALT-attribute.
Ambient Light Also known as "available light" or "existing light". It's the surrounding light within an environment. Ambient light are used to read proofs.
Anchor Point Anchor points allows the user to manipulate paths to change it's shape. It (anchor points) appears along a path at every curve of a path and at the beginning and end of a path. Anchor points does not print out.
Animated GIF A GIF graphic file, which consists of two or more images shown in a timed sequence to give the effect of motion.
Animation Animation is the creating a timed sequence or series of graphic images or frames together to give the appearance of continuous movement.
Anti-Aliasing Smoothing or blending the transition of pixels in an image. Anti-aliasing the edges on a graphic image makes the edges appear smooth, not jagged.
Aqueous Coating Aqueous Coating is a water-based coating applied after printing. It helps the underlying ink from rubbing off. Such a coating can give a gloss, dull or matte finish. It can be applied while the paper is still on press, or after it's off press.
Archival Paper Archival paper is typically acid-free and has a quality lifetime of about 100 years or longer. This paper is used to keep critical records for many years.
Archiving Data To archive data means to store copies of information for long periods of time.
Art Director The person responsible for managing the creative and production process for a given project as well as the people working on the project.
ASP (Active Server Page) A dynamically generated web page, generally using ActiveX scripting. When a browser or a search engine spider requests an ASP page from a server, the server generates the web page with HTML code and gives it to the browser or spider.
Auto Trace A function in graphic design software that automatically traces images. Paths are created along the edges of a scanned sketch. The paths are then cleaned up and the scanned file are discarded off. Now you have an outlined sketch of the image you scanned.
B
Backing-up data The act of safeguarding your work against equipment malfunction. Data can be backed-up (copied) on various storage mediums like Floppy disks and storage tapes to compact disks.
Bandwidth Bandwidth is the amount of information your connection to the Internet can carry. On average, typical telephone lines can carry 1K of information per second.
Banner A banner is a graphic image (static, animated, or rich media) that is placed on web sites as an advertisement. Banners are commonly used for brand awareness and generating sales.
Bevel Adding a beveled effect to a graphic image gives the image a raised appearance by applying highlight colors and shadow colors to the inside and outside edges.
Bezier The bezier (or Pen) tool draws curved line segments that can be reshaped by changing its anchor points and/or direction lines.
Bitmap graphic A graphic imange which is composed of a pattern of dots. The individual dots are stored as data on a computer. An example of an animation that is a bitmap graphic is a GIF animation.
Bitmap Image (bmp) A graphic image stored as a specific arrangement of screen dots, or pixels. Web graphics are bitmap images. A graphic which is defined by specifying the colors of dots or pixels which make up the picture. Also known as raster graphics. Common types of bitmap graphics are GIF, JPEG, Photoshop, PCX, TIFF, Macintosh Paint, Microsoft Paint, PNG, FAX formats, and TGA.
Bleed or Bleeding Edge When a page or a cover design extends to and off the edge of the paper it is called a "bleed". In print design, the artwork or block of color must extend off the edge of the page. The artwork or block of color is then printed on larger-size paper. Then the printed page is trimmed to the desired size.
Boldface*
whee hee hee I just
boldfaced the text
whee Sorry, was having a bit of fun with this one since it is the same as Bold just has an added word to it* ~Panther
Makes text darker than the surrounding text. With this technique, the emphasized text strongly stands out from the rest; it should therefore be used to
highlight certain keywords that are important to the subject of the text, for easy visual scanning of text. For example, printed dictionaries often use
boldface for their keywords, and the names of articles can conventionally be marked in
bold.
Bookmark Just as a paper bookmark is used as a reminder of the page you are on in a book, electronic bookmarks are used to bring you back to a web site or other site you may want to return to. The Netscape browser lets you bookmark any site and save the bookmarks in a file you can recall at any time. Microsoft Internet Explorer uses the term "favorite" instead of bookmark for the same concept.
Brightness The brightness (light/dark) of an image, the intensity of a light source or color luminance.
Browser The software used to view, manage, and access web pages by interpreting hypertext and hyperlinks. The two most common browsers are Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Web pages often appear differently depending on the brand and version of the browser intended to view them in.
Burn A tool used (in Adobe Photoshop) to darken an area of an image.
