Fine Print School | Glossary: G

Grant: A sum of money paid in the form of a gift to finance a particular project, such as a book.

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Graphic Arts: The trades, industries and professions related to the designing and manufacturing of a printed product.

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Graphic Arts Film: Film whose emulsion responds to light on an all-or-nothing principle to yield high contrast images.

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Graphic Arts Magnifier: Lens, mounted in a small stand, used to inspect copy, negatives, and printing.

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Graphic Backgrounds: The bottom-most layer on a web page, usually with either a design or color that highlights the above copy. A small graphic can be tiled to create a background texture for a web page.

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Graphic Design: The art of putting together text, illustrations and other visual elements to create a specific message. The specifications, for paper, ink and the type of printing process to be used, also are part of the design.

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Graphic Designer: A person who puts together the text, illustrations and other visual elements to create a design appropriate for the product.

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Graphic Paper, Coated Fine Paper: Fine paper with a pigmented surface layer which increases the uniformity of the printing surface and provides improved printing properties, particularly for the reproduction of illustrations.

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Graphical User Interface: GUI

A particular case of user interface for interacting with a computer which employs graphical images and widgets in addition to text to represent the information and actions available to the user.

A computer program code that enables the user to have quick and easy access to program features such as buttons, icons, graphics and pull-down menus without having to learn complex programming.

Usually the actions are performed through direct manipulation of the graphical elements.

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Graphics: A visual illustration created by drawing, photography, writing or engraving, used to make text copy more understandable or interesting.

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Graphics File: General term used for a computer file containing a picture: photographic image, illustration etc.

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Graphics Interchange Format: GIF

One of the two most popular file formats for graphics on the Internet, the other being JPEG. It is popular because it reduces the file size of the image. It supports black and white, color, and transparency. It is best suited for images containing large areas of the same color.

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Gravure: The process of printing from an etched copper cylinder or wraparound plate that contain cells that hold the ink for transfer to the substrate. In gravure color printing, each succeeding color is printed on a dry color, rather than one still wet as in offset lithography.

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Gravure printing paper: An especially soft, absorbent grade of paper, such as handmade papers from Japan with silky fibers especially suited to capture the nuances of hand-pressed copperplate prints.

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Gray Balance: The neutral shades of gray that are produced in color printing when cyan, magenta and yellow are combined.

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Gray Board: Flat substrate made of mostly uniform fiber layers over 225 g/m2 and colored gray.

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Gray Component Replacement: GCR

A technique used in the color separation process that replaces the neutral gray portion in cyan, magenta, and yellow with black. Instead of the cyan, magenta and yellow to producing these grays, they are produced with the black.

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Gray Levels: The number of different gray tones a computer is capable of producing.

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Gray Scale: A strip of paper containing gray tones ranging from white to black. Used to analyze and obtain the optimal tonal range and contrast of an image. Scanner and process camera operators use to determine exposure times for film and plates.

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Greeked Text: Body text that is made illegible when viewed at 12 points or below, for the purpose of speeding screen redraw or creating a rough layout.

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Greeking: Areas of gray are used to simulate lines of text at a point when the actual text a concern. It helps to speed the process when developing a draft of a page.

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Green Seal: A nonprofit organization devoted to environmental standard setting, product certification, advertising claims substantiation and public education.

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Grid: A pattern of lines, printed on paper or displayed on a monitor, representing the layout of a printed product. The grid is used to help organize and position the copy for the printed piece.

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Grid Cells: The combination of recorder elements (RELs) into a visual (halftone) dot.

The physical size of the grid cell remains constant, and a computer program then defines the filling of the cell with picture elements or a pixel pattern in accordance with the color or gray value to be reproduced.

See Also Screen Cells.

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Grid Pattern: The shape of the halftone screen dots. Some common shapes are linear, elliptical, and round. Different shapes cause different effects in the final output.

Adobe Photoshop allows you to specify a diamond dot, which is supported on some of the newer imagesetters.

Contact your vendor to find out whether your imagesetter supports the diamond dot function.

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Grid-Based Electric Demand Reduction Programs: Programs in which participating companies reduce their electric energy consumption in periods of heavy demand, such as during a heat wave, in order to prevent widespread failure of the electric power system.

Electric consumers are given financial incentives in the form of cost savings to reduce their energy load.

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Griffo, Francesco (1450-1518): The Venetian die-cutter known as the inventor of italic type. In February 1496, the letterpress printer Aldus Manutius published an essay by the Italian scholar Pietro Bembo. The italic type “Bembo”, which was developed by Griffo from an official papal font, quickly gained in popularity and would later play an influential role in font design.

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Grind Edge: Alternate term for binding edge when referring to perfect bound products.

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Grindoff: The area that is removed along the spine of the gathered signatures before perfect binding. Approximately 1/8” is removed from the spine.

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Gripper: A row of clips that holds a sheet of paper as it speeds through the press.

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Fine Print Knowledge Center

Glossary: G

GUI