There are a lot of terms that have been adopted by the printing industry. Hopefully the glossary below will help.
Used for calibration uses only. Measures the density of colour - can not be used for the creation of colour profiles.
A process of averaging primary colours to approximate other colours.
A parallel or USB plug that acts as a physical key required to unlock some software. Used to eliminate piracy or unauthorized duplication of the software.
a process of the dot placed by the printer growing in size from what the printer produced. This can be controlled by changing the humidity or temperature the printer is in, or by re-calibrating the printer.
Dots Per Inch. eg: 600dpi means that a printer will produce 600 dots per inch both horizontally and vertically. Important to not that this is NOT the same as PPI (Pixels Per Inch) which communicates information about a file. A 150ppi file in most cases would be more than suitable for 600dpi print.
- Dye Sublimation (Dye Sub)
A printing process where ink is placed onto a carrier paper or film. The carrier is then placed on a polyester based product (such as a coffee mug or fabric) and heat is applied. This vapourises the ink which in tern transfers into the fibres of the polyester as a permanent print.
Reference profiles that are contained inside a raster file. Supported in JPG, PSD & TIFF file types.
- Fingerprint (press fingerprint)
Each offset press has different print tendencies, so a fingerprint refers to a unique custom profile that is created for that press. This is most often done by ramping the press up (printing the profile test chart) and when the results are deemed stable and repeatable by the press operator, a series of printed sheets are pulled the acceptable pile of printed sheets. These sheets are all scanned in and then averaged using special software. It's important to note that this fingerprint profile is specific to that media used on the press (usually a house stock would be used).
Occurs on media when too much ink is applied to a stock and the ink puddles on the media. Similar to Pooling.