L

Lab (CIE L*a*b): A color model created by the Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage (CIE). It contains a luminance (or lightness) component (L) and two chromatic components: "a" (green to red) and "b" (blue to yellow).

Lap register: used with knockouts, images of different colors are slightly overlapped, to avoid the appearance of a white line between the two inks.

Lacquer: A clear gloss coating applied to printed material for strength, appearance and protection.

Laid finish: A parallel lined paper that has a handmade look.

Landscape (orientation): a page or layout that is wider than it is tall.

Layout: A rendition that shows the placement of all the elements, roughs, thumbnails etc., of the final printed piece before it goes to print.

Leader: a line of dots or dashes to lead the eye across the page to separated copy.

L eader tabs: A row of characters placed between text objects to help the reader follow a line across white space. Leader tabs are often used in place of tab stops, especially before text that is flush right such as in a list or table of contents.

Leading: (pronounced "led-ding") the space between lines of type, traditionally measured baseline-to-baseline, in points. Text type is generally set with one or two points of leading; for example, 10-point type with 2 points of leading. This is described as 10/12, read ten on twelve.

Ledger paper: A stiff, heavy business paper generally used for keeping records.

Letterforms: in typography, the shapes of the characters.

Letterpress: Printing that utilizes inked raised surfaces to create the image.

Letterspacing: Adjusting the average distance between letters in a block of text to fit more or less text into the given space or to improve legibility. Kerning allows adjustments between individual letters; letterspacing is applied to a block of text as a whole. Letterspacing is sometimes referred to as tracking or track kerning.

Ligature: in typography, characters that are bound to each other, such as "oe" and "ae." In professional typefaces, the lowercase "f" is also often set as a ligature in combination with other characters such as "fi" and "fl."

Light (font): a font that is lighter than the roman (normal, plain, or book) version of the typeface.

Line art: black-and-white artwork with no gray areas. Pen-and-ink drawings are line art, and most graphic images produced with desktop publishing graphics programs can be treated as line art. For printing purposes, positive halftones can be handled as line art.

Line copy: Any copy that can be reproduced without the use of halftone screens.

Linen: A paper that emulates the look and texture of linen cloth.

Lino, Linotronic: Professional-quality, high-resolution output printed from files prepared on a desktop system.

Logotype: a symbol, mark, or identifying name.

LZW: A lossless file compression technique that results in smaller file size and faster processing time. LZW compression is commonly used on .gif and .tiff files.