An international technical association for professionals in the graphic arts industry founded in 1948. Its some 900 members include scientists and engineers from publishing houses, print shops and other graphic arts businesses and suppliers.

A kind of adhesive labels that make any attempts to open or manipulate the product visible. Special tamper-evident labels are used, for example, to protect the integrity of packaging.

A guide for positioning pages or parts of pages consisting of a series of lines to indicate final trim size, bleed, head margin, back margin, type page size and other elements.

The electromagnetic waves found in the spectrum between microwaves and infra-red light with a frequency of approximately 300 GHz to 10 Terahertz (wavelengths of 1 mm to 30 μm). In addition to fast data communication and measuring applications in atmospheric research and astrophysics, new imaging methods are just one of the future areas of application for this segment of the spectrum. Scientists are working on a method of making the content of books visible without having to open them. This work is intended to make it possible to look at manuscripts that are already so damaged that opening them would destroy them completely.

A color rendered from the mixing of three primary colors. Examples include brown, olive and ochre.

Pronounced “tech”; a typesetting program developed by the American computer scientist Donald E. Knuth in the late 1970s specifically for scientific texts. Unlike today's standard layout software, such as Quark Xpress or InDesign, TeX is not based on a graphic user interface, but processes texts containing formatting instructions. The software is available for numerous computer types and uses its own fonts that are developed using the Metafont program

See "spacing".

Inks with special structures that create their color impression in part or whole by their physical structure and not by their dyes or pigments. Such inks can contain elements that selectively reflect light of a certain wavelength with the aid of interference effects. Textured inks create shimmering color effects that can vary, depending on the viewing angle. This kind

Refers to technology employed in flat screen monitors, in which minute transistor elements control the alignment of liquid crystals in such a way that light is allowed to pass through or is blocked. Within the TFT element, the total brightness and color reproduction are simultaneously controlled. The light for every pixel passes through a color cell consisting of three color filters (red, green, blue), and every filter is equipped with a transistor that can be driven separately and controls the transmittance of light of every color element. See also “LCD”.

Inks that change color or disappear completely as the temperature changes, including as a result of brief exposure to body heat. Such inks are used to protect documents against forgery, and as temperature indicators for drinks and medicines, as well as for the monitoring of heating and cooling units. Another application is the indication of potential damage to heat-sensitive products, since certain thermochromic printing inks change color permanently at certain temperatures.

The characteristic of certain viscous substances to become less viscous through mechanical action (stirring). Thixotropic materials are used in offset printing inks to enhance the quality of multi-color printing. The lower viscosity inks in the inking unit solidify to a certain degree on the printing stock before drying, and additional printing processes are thus optimized.

A cutting machine equipped with three blades for cutting products on three different sides. Such machines typically operate in two stages. First top and bottom edges are trimmed, and the third blade then trims the front edge

Test used to determine the grain direction of paper.

A file format used for images and defined by a computer industry committee in 1986. It is a so-called screen format that contains information on the brightness and hue of every pixel. The TIFF format supports various color systems, from black-and-white to full-color RGB images. TIFF files can be compressed by a variety of methods.

The term used for various paper grades with a grammage of up to 30 gsm.