Glossary

Book production has a vocabulary of its own, and this manual uses it. You don't need any of it to publish with Keystone, but it turns up in what print platforms ask of you, so this is where it's defined. Where a page puts a word to work, the entry points at it.

back matter

Everything after the main text — appendix, glossary, bibliography, index, colophon. The counterpart to front matter: where that numbers its pages separately, this carries straight on from the body. Its headings vary: appendices are lettered or numbered in roman, a glossary or index not at all. See Appendices.

bleed

Ink that runs past the edge of the trimmed page. Cutting is never exact to the millimeter, so art meant to reach the edge is drawn oversized; without that overhang a sliver of white shows wherever the blade lands wide. Printers specify how much they want, typically 3mm or 0.125in, and whether a book that bleeds on any page must be built oversized throughout — on the outer edges, never the bound one. A book with no art at any edge needs none of it. See Print-on-demand.

block paragraphs

Paragraphs separated by vertical space instead of a first-line indent — the convention in reports and business writing. Whether the text is justified is a separate choice. Books traditionally do the reverse: indent the first line and close the gap. See Body text.

case-bound

Bound in a rigid cover — boards wrapped in cloth or printed paper, with the pages glued or sewn into the case. What most people call a hardcover. The case and any dust jacket are a separate production job from the interior PDF, which is the file Keystone builds.

colophon

A short note at the end of a book recording how it was made — the typeface, the paper, the press, sometimes the size of the print run. Traditionally the printer's sign-off; in self-publishing, "set in EB Garamond, built with Keystone" does the same work. Nothing requires one; it's an ordinary heading at the back, usually kept out of the contents. See Headings.

copyright page

The page in the front matter carrying the copyright notice, edition, printing history, ISBN and publisher. Conventionally the verso of the title page.

drop folio

A page number at the foot of the page, on one that carries no running header — a chapter opening, the first page of the contents. Convention centers it, whatever the body pages do. See Opening pages.

folio

The page number as printed on the page. A printer's word, and a useful one: "page 12" is ambiguous between the twelfth page and the page marked 12. A book whose front matter numbers in roman has both, and they are not the same page. See Page numbers.

front matter

Everything before the main text — half-title, title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents, foreword, preface. Convention numbers its pages in lowercase roman and restarts at 1 for the body, which the book and scrbook targets do. Its headings carry no chapter number. See Unnumbered headings.

gutter

The extra inner margin a binding takes, so text doesn't disappear into the curve where the pages are joined at the spine. How much depends on the binding and the page count — a thick perfect-bound paperback swallows several millimeters, a saddle-stitched booklet almost none. Print-on-demand platforms publish a minimum for each page count. See The gutter.

half-title

A page carrying the book's title alone, ahead of the full title page. In a traditional book it is the first printed page.

imposition

Arranging the pages of a book onto large press sheets so that, once printed, folded and trimmed, they land in reading order — a single sheet might carry 16 or 32 pages. Print-on-demand services impose for you and want a plain one-page-per-page PDF; imposing it yourself would break their process. Keystone builds exactly that.

ISBN

International Standard Book Number — the 13-digit identifier retailers and libraries catalog a book by. Each format and edition takes its own: the paperback, the hardcover and the EPUB are three ISBNs, not one. See Before you upload.

leading

The vertical space between lines of type, measured baseline to baseline. Named for the strips of lead once used to create it, and pronounced "ledding". See Line spacing — linestretch sets it as a multiple of single spacing.

offset printing

The traditional high-volume process: the image is put onto a plate, inked, transferred ("offset") to a rubber blanket, and from there to paper. Setup is expensive and per-copy cost is low, so it wins somewhere in the high hundreds to a thousand copies. Shorter runs go to print-on-demand instead.

perfect-bound

Bound by gluing the pages at the spine inside a wrapped paper cover — the ordinary paperback. "Perfect" is a trade name, not a claim: milled flat and glued rather than sewn, the book resists lying open and curves into the spine as it thickens. That curve is what the gutter compensates for. See The gutter.

print-on-demand (POD)

Printing a copy when someone orders it, rather than printing a run and warehousing it. Per-copy cost is higher than offset, but there's no inventory and no minimum order — which is what makes self-publishing a single title practical. Each platform sets its own trim sizes, margin minima and file specs. See Print-on-demand.

ragged-right

Text set with an even left edge and an uneven right one, the lines ending where they fall rather than being stretched to meet the margin. Hyphenation still applies, so a line can break mid-word. The alternative to justified text, which opens the word spaces until both edges align. See Body text.

recto

The right-hand page of an open book, odd-numbered in a two-sided layout. Chapters conventionally open on a recto, which is why a chapter that ends on one leaves the following verso blank. See Two-sided layout.

reflowable

Of an e-book: the text has no fixed pages and re-wraps to the reader's screen, font and type size. Keystone's EPUB is reflowable; PDF is not. Anything that depends on where a page ends — a hand-placed page break, a page number, a running header — has no meaning in a reflowable format. See EPUB.

saddle-stitched

Bound by folding a stack of sheets down the middle and stapling through the fold — booklets, zines, chapbooks. Cheap, and only works for thin books, perhaps 64 pages. It opens flat, so it needs little or no gutter, unlike a perfect-bound book of the same length. See The gutter.

signature

In printing, the group of pages produced from a single folded press sheet — commonly 8, 16 or 32. A book bound from whole signatures has a page count that is a multiple of the size used, so a printer may ask for blank pages to reach the next one. Print-on-demand prints single sheets and sets its own page-count rules instead. The word carries unrelated senses elsewhere in this manual: a cryptographic signature on a download, and a signed name at the end of a letter.

SPDX

Software Package Data Exchange — the standard whose license list names each license it covers with a short identifier, version included where the license has one: OFL-1.1, LPPL-1.3c, Bitstream-Vera. Every font the engine ships carries one in your template's NOTICE.md, beside the license's full name. See License & attribution.

spine

The bound edge of a book, where the pages are joined. On the page it's the inner edge, and it's what the gutter reserves room for. It carries the title for the shelf once the book is thick enough — printers set a minimum page count below which spine text isn't allowed. See The gutter.

spread

The two facing pages of an open book, seen as one unit — a verso on the left, a recto on the right. Designers work in spreads because the reader sees both at once: the two inner margins meet in the middle and read as a single band. That is why they're set narrower than the outer margins. See Margins.

trim size

The finished dimensions of a page once the printed sheet is cut down — the size a reader holds. Named sizes like A5 and Letter are trim sizes that happen to have names; a platform-specific trim usually has none and is given as dimensions. See Page sizes for the names Keystone knows, and Before you upload for the common print-on-demand trims.

verso

The left-hand page of an open book, even-numbered in a two-sided layout. The verso conventionally carries the book title in its running head, against the chapter title on the recto. See Two-sided layout.

XMP

Extensible Metadata Platform — a standard (ISO 16684-1, originally Adobe's) for embedding metadata (title, author, keywords, rights) inside the file rather than carrying it alongside. By default Keystone writes an XMP packet into the PDF, where catalogs, indexers and asset managers can read it. See Code & output metadata.