While thousands of you have tons of industry experience, thousands of you don’t. For those who are new to working with the print industry – especially those who work for a company or agency that sources print – this post is for you.

Here are a few common words and phrases you might hear during your dealings with printers, and what they mean.

Web printing has nothing to do with printing off the Internet. Web printing refers to work produced on large printing presses that use rolls (webs) of paper, as opposed to paper that’s cut into sheets. Web printing is suitable for really large quantities and/or very long runs. So when someone asks, “Is this running sheet or web?” you’ll know what it means.

Digital printing, in the words of Steve Suffoletto, a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer for Diamond Packaging, “…is any process that can regenerate a new image for each impression or print cycle.” The key words here are “new “ and “each.” Traditional offset presses print static impressions over and over again. Digital presses produce a new image every time. You need to do something personalized or customized? You’ll go digital.

Full-color or process color or 4-C (four-color) all refer to using four specific colors: cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, plus black, to reproduce color photos or illustrations. They’re abbreviated as CMYK. (True story: when I worked in print production at Boston University, I asked a professor if he wanted to use 4-color in his upcoming brochure. He replied, “Four colors?? No, I want to use all the colors!”)

Substrate refers to the material that a printer prints on. Most of the time it’s paper, but you can print on plastic, fabric, foil and many other materials.

Trade printers (as in “we print for the trade”) serve other printers, not you or me.

pURLS stand for personalized URLs. It’s a technology that lets you create a unique URL for each person you’re targeting. They’re trackable.

CSR stands for Customer Service Rep. These are the angels who work in printing companies and serve customers like you and me. Often, you’ll deal with the CSR, not the sales rep, once you give a printer a job.

PMS stands for Pantone Matching System® and refers to the standard ink color system used by commercial printers. According to the Pantone site, there are now 1755 color choices available. It also says 644 new PMS colors have been added since 2010. Holy cow. Pantone’s world headquarters are in my hometown: New Jersey!

Makeready refers to the time and work needed to get a printing press ready to produce your job. It’s part of the prepress process. There’s no makeready for digital jobs – or so I thought. I heard from Bob Harrington of EnvisionInk Printing Solutions that frequently on his digital presses, they have to tweak color so it matches a customer’s sample, and he does indeed consider this makeready. Thanks, Bob!

Soft proofs refer to proofs a printer will send you to view on your computer monitor as opposed to hard proofs, which are physical proofs you can hold in your hands.

Interactive print solutions is a term that generally refers to campaigns that marry printed materials with other multichannel communications, like mobile, email or Internet.

These terms are more important for corporate or agency print buyers to know. Consumers who only buy print occasionally can benefit from this knowledge as well.

(c) 2015 Margie Dana. All rights reserved.