There are a lot of terms important to desktop publishing. Some of them aren't actual words but rather letters, abbreviations. Some are need to know. Some are nice to know. How much of this abbreviated desktop publishing terminology do you know?
A4 (as well as A0, A1, A2, A3)
Side-by-side comparison of US letter size to A4 size paper.
These A's refer to paper sizes used in many countries outside of North America. The A4 size is roughly equivalent to letter size used in the US. Paper in the US is generally measured in inches, but A sizes are measured in millimeters.
AA or AAs
An AA late in the design process can be expensive.
No, not Alcoholics Anonymous or American Airlines. This AA indicates a client-requested change to your desktop publishing project known as Author's Alterations. The term especially applies to changes they ask for after the layout has already been approved and is on the way or already in the printing phase.
CMYK
Simulation of an image separated into CMYK color plates for printing.
Sometimes abbreviated as CYMK, each letter represents a color of ink: cyan, magenta, yellow, black (keyline). It's a color printing process used in desktop publishing. A newbie mistake often made when submitting artwork for 4-color printing is not converting the images to the CMYK color space. Working in RGB is often desirable, but CMYK is needed by the printer so that the file can be separated into the four colors so that a separate printing plate can be made for each of the colors.
Comp
Outside of desktop publishing, comp might be an abbreviation for compensation or complimentary. But for designer's it's short for comprehensive or composite and can refer to multiple things. A comp is used during several phases of the design and printing process but it's not the final product.
DCS
It stands for Desktop Color Separations, and it's a special EPS format. It's not used as much these days but it's good to know about it for those instances when it is needed.
DPI
It's dots per inch, a measure of the resolution of a printer. DPI is not image resolution although frequently used that way.
DTP
For our purposes, it's not the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine. It's shorthand for desktop publishing. It's can also stand for Direct-to-Plate, a printing method that bypasses the use of film to create printing plates. Doing DTP means doing desktop publishing.
EPS
Encapsulated PostScript is an important vector graphic format used in desktop publishing. Usually EPS files are created and edited in illustration programs such as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, or Freehand.
EULA
Portion of the EULA from a digital font file.
You might know the End User License Agreement as simply license agreement or terms of use. If you use software, fonts, clip art, or templates you'll need to be familiar with its EULA. It tells you what you can and cannot do with the product.
FPO
You may not run into For Position Only as much now that digital photography is so common. It refers to a placeholder spot for camera-ready artwork. FPO images are commonly used when you've been supplied actual photographic prints or other type of artwork to be scanned or photographed for inclusion in your layout.
