Glossary

• Saddle-stitching - It's probably the easiest (have you the tools) and the most economical binding method. Pages are folded, creased and stapled together (not by an ordinary stapler - a stapler with long jaws, designed specifically for saddle stitching). We often see this type of binding used for lookbooks, booklets, and magazines that have a smaller page count.

• Perfect Binding - A form of binding most often used in the types of books you find yourself reading on the train or at home, otherwise known as paperback or softcover books. Perfect bound books can also be useful for manuals, catalogues, and annuals. Pages are folded into sections (termed signatures in the industry) and glued with a heavier printed wrap-around cover into the spine using a strong adhesive. It's not the strongest form of binding and your book won't open flat; you'll know a book has been poorly perfect bound when your pages start falling out.

• Section Sewn - Your most secure binding method. Here pages are folded together into sections (signatures). Each section is then sewn into the following section along the spine. The spine is then glued together for extra support and the cover then attached. A Section Sewn book, regardless of pagecount will be able to lay flat.

• Wire Binding/ Spiral Binding - Most of you would have bound a document throughout school or university using one of these methods. In a nutshell, holes are punched through the pages of your document near the bound edge, and held together using either wire or plastic coils. If you're after a something a little fancier, a a document can be wire bound inside a hard cover, cloth or printed case.

• Cased-in Wiro Binding - If you would like to hide the wire from the outside there is a solution known as a Cased-in Wiro. This technique, however, is more involved than your traditional wiro bound document, but the final result looks lovely as you can see.

• Pamphlet Binding uses a single section (signature) and is sewn with a running stitch down the spine; often an alternative to stapling (saddle stitch) but in my opinion leaves you with a much more elegant finish.

• Coptic Binding – A non-adhesive form of binding that stems from bookbinding methods employed by ancient Egyptians! Signatures are sewn through their folds, and attached to one another and again sewn through two loose covered boards with a chain like stitch across the spine.

In printing, a “bleed” is where your background color or image extends all the way to the edge of the sheet. This must be printed on a larger sheet and then trimmed down. In other words, the bleed is the area to be trimmed off. After trimming, the bleed ensures that no unprinted edges are in the final trimmed document.

In printing, the term Collate refers to the gathering and arranging of individual sheets or other printed components into a pre-determined sequence. Basically, Collating creates consistent, logical sets from multiple parts. Diagram A illustrates four sets of documents which have been collated

Continuous forms - also known as “dot-matrix” forms or “pin-fed” forms - are either carbonless or carbon-interleaved. See also NCR books.

Die cutting is seen in business cards, postcards, brochures and all personal stationary sets. The best way to describe die cutting is a cookie cutter - A blade is formed into a certain shape, and then used to cut the paper. The die is embedded into a block of wood that is securely held in a die cutting press. The machine presses the paper against a metal plate, cutting the shape into the printer.

Imposition, broadly defined, is what describes the arrangement of pages on the press sheet so that when folded, the pages will read consecutively. When you decide how to arrange the pages on the sheet, you will base it on the size of the press sheet and the pages, as well as how the job will be folded and bound. The imposition design will also depend, in part, on the binding method to be used. It consists of the arrangement of the printed product's pages on the printer's sheet, in order to obtain faster printing, simplify binding and reduce paper waste.

• Lithography/Lithographic and offset printing, or litho printing for short, is where the image of the content you want to produce is placed on a plate which is then covered in ink and used for printing. This process can be used to print on paper, cardboard and many other materials.

• Flexographic printing plates are flexible photopolymer plates, used in flexo printing to transfer ink & images to a flexible substrate, such as paper or film. ... The plates are designed in relief, which means the print surface is raised where the image has been exposed.

A signature is a group of pages that are printed on both sides of a single sheet of paper that once folded, trimmed, bound and cut, become a specific number of pages depending on the page size and the size of the press sheet.

To clean the colour station so a different colour can be used. This process will ensure that the next colour will not mix with the old colour and to not make unwanted stains on the print job.

A Work-and-tumble layout is equivalent to the Work-and-turn, except that following the printing of the first side of the press sheet, the paper is “tumbled” or flipped from top to bottom. In other words, the left side of the press sheet for the first side printing is the same as the left side of the press sheet on the second side printing.

A Work-and-turn layout means that after the first side of the press sheet is printed, the paper is flipped over side-to-side and fed through the printing press again. Unlike the Work-and-tumble method, when flipping, the top and bottom are not inverted. The top of the first side is the top on the second side.