OUGD404 What is a Book (Process)

Grid: The grid system in graphic design is a way of organising content on a page, using any combination of margins, guides, rows and columns. It is commonly seen in newspaper and magazine layout with columns of text and images. One grid, or a collection of grids, may be used across an entire project to achieve a consistent look and feel. In a finished product, the grid is invisible, but following it helps in creating successful print and web layouts.

Columns: Some software may have special dialog boxes for setting up pre-set or custom columns with gutters. Non-printing column guides can be placed on master or publication pages. Normally all pages begin with a single column — the space between the margins. With multiple columns, a pair of vertical guides that move together mark gutters oralley between columns. Column guides control the flow of text within columns, keeping it out of the gutters.

Gutters: The margin space available along the binding edge.

Drop Caps: Decorative initial caps (capital letters) at the start of a paragraph that drop into a space created within the first few lines of the text are dropped caps, also written as drop caps. As with any initial cap, the size and placement of this letter is designed to draw readers into the narrative. The common term dropped caps or drop caps for all initial caps is actually a specific style or placement. Adjacent caps and raised caps are two specific styles or placement of initial caps.

Imposition: Imposition is one of the fundamental steps in the prepress printing process. It consists in 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.Correct imposition minimizes printing time by maximizing the number of pages per impression, reducing cost of press time and materials. To achieve this, the printed sheet must be filled as fully as possible

Folio Numbers: There were loads of meanings to the word folio that all have to do with paper size or pages in a book. Some common meanings are described below with links to even more details. A sheet of paper folded in half is a folio. Each half of the folio is a leaf; therefore a single folio would have 4 pages (2 each side of a leaf). Several folios placed one inside the other create a signature. A single signature is a booklet or small book. Multiple signatures make a traditional book.

Pagination:  is the process of dividing (content) into discrete pages, either electronic pages or printed pages. Today the latter are usually simply instances of the former that have been outputted to a printing device, such as a desktop printer or a modern printing press. For example, printed books and magazines are created first as electronic files and then printed. Pagination encompasses rules and algorithms for deciding where page breaks will fall, which depends on semantic or cultural senses of which content belongs on the same page with related content and thus should not fall to another (e.g., widows and orphans). Pagination is sometimes a part of page layout, and other times is merely a process of arbitrary fragmentation. The difference is in the degree of intelligence that is required to produce an output that the users deem acceptable or desirable. Before the rise of information technology (IT), pagination was a manual process, and print output was its sole purpose. Every instance of a pagination decision was made by a human. Today, most instances are made by machines, although humans often override particular decisions (such as by inserting a hard page break). As years go by, software developers continually refine the programs to increase the quality of the machine-made decisions (make them "smarter") so that the need for manual overrides becomes increasingly rare.