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R

Rag Paper
High quality stationery made from cotton rags.

Ragged Left/Right
Successive lines of type which are of unequal length and which are aligned at either the right or lefthand column but not both.

Raster Image Processor (RIP)
The hardware or software engine which calculates the bitmapped image of text and graphics from a series of instructions. RIPs can be expensive because of high licensing fees for page description languages such as PostScript.

Reader Pairs
Two consecutive pages as they appear in printed piece.

Ream
500 sheets of paper.

Recycled Paper
Paper from wastepaper in varying percentages. The quality of ‘green’ paper has greatly improved. The criteria for ‘green’ paper is the lack of chlorine used, the use of sustainable forests in the production of the paper and the ability of the paper to be recycled. Recycled paper can be coated or uncoated.

Reference Marks
Symbols used in text to direct the reader to a footnote, e.g. asterisk (*), dagger, double dagger, section mark, paragraph mark.

Reflective Art
Original material which reflects light. Examples of reflective art are photographic prints, drawings and printed material.

Registration Marks
Registration marks are used to help align the various levels of film during the stripping process. Without registration marks it is very difficult to keep process colors (such as CMYK) in exactly the correct position on the final printing plates, making color distortion and image blurring difficult to avoid.

Registration Color
A registration color is applied to objects that you want to print across all plates, including spot color plates. Typical application of registration color would be crop marks, fold marks and trim marks.

Resolution
(See DPI)

Retouching
A means of altering artwork or color separations to correct faults or enhance the image.

Reverse Out
To reproduce as a white image out of a solid background.

Reversed Type
The background is printed instead of the type.

RGB
Red, Green, and Blue are used in television and computer monitors to create all colors. RGB is similar to the CMYK used in process printing in that all colors are created by various combinations of a few base colors. However, the colors seen on your RGB screen will only accurately represent the colors printed in CMYK when very expensive, calibrated computer systems and translators are used.

Right Reading
A positive or negative which reads from left to right.

RIP
(See Raster Image Processor)

Roman
Type which has vertical stems as distinct from italics or oblique which are set at angles.

Rough
A preliminary sketch of a proposed design.

Royal
A size of printing paper 20in x 25in (508 x 635mm).

Rule
Straight line.

Run-On
Additional copies of a job printed while still on the press. Run-on costs are useful for estimating varying quantities of one job.

Running Lead
A line of type at the top of a page which repeats a heading, such as the chapter name or book title.