Printing Terms Dictionary
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L*A*B*: A system for describing, measuring, and controlling color, using hue, luminance, and brightness established by the International Committee on Illumination (CIE).
LAN: Local Area Network. High-speed transmissions over twisted pair, coax, or fiber optic cables that connect terminals, personal computers, mainframe computers, and peripherals together at distances of about 1 mile or less.
Landscape: Page or monitor orientation in which the page width exceeds the page length. Contrast with portrait.
Laser: The acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission by radiation. The laser is an intense light beam with a very narrow band width that can produce images by electronic impulses. It makes possible imaging by remote control from computers or facsimile transmissions.
Layout: The drawing or sketch of a proposed printed piece. In platemaking, a sheet indicating the settings or distance between images when step and repeat processes are involved.
LCD: Liquid Cyrstal Display. An electronic component containing a tiny quantity of liquid that crystalizes (turns black) when a small electrical current passes through it, and returns to a liquid state when the current is switched off.
Leaders: Dashes or dots arranged in a row to guide the eye across the page. Leaders are commonly used in tabular work.
Leading: Pronounced "ledding". A typesetting term for the distance from baseline to baseline between lines of printed text.
Letterspacing: Small amounts of extra space inserted between letters in typeset text, to improve their appearance and readability or to fill out a line.
Ligature: Certain letter combinations that appear frequently together in fonts are combined as one character.
Line Screen: The resolution of a halftone, expressed in lines per inch.
Line Shot: A negative image, photographed from mechanical art, that is used for stripping or scanning.
Line Work: Artwork that, unlike a continous-tone image, has no gradations of tone and, therefore, does not require screening for reproduction in print.
Link: In desktop publishing, joining text boxes so that text will flow from box to box. It also refers to hardware/software which allows otherwise incompatible systems to pass data back and forth.
Lo-res: Short for low resolution. Low quality reproduction because of a small number of dots or lines per inch.
LocalTalk: A basic, inexpensive implementation of the AppleTalk networking protocol.
Look Up Table: A set of values in tabular form for input or output relationships. Such tables are most often associated with color calibration issues and determining how a color system translates from one color space to another.
Low Key: Describes an image that mainly consists of midtones and shadows.
LPI: Lines per inch. Measure of resolution for halftones.
Luminance: One of the components of an HSL (hue, saturation, luminance) RGB (red, green, blue) image on a video monitor. It is the highest of the RGB values plus the lowest of theRGB values, dived by two.