Lacquer A clear resin/solvent coating, usually glossy, applied to a printed sheet for protection or appearance.

Laid paper Paper with a pattern of parallel lines at equal distances, giving a ribbed effect.

Lamination A plastic film coating bonded by heat and pressure to a printed sheet for protection or appearance.

LAN (Local Area Network) Communication link in a localized area, such as an office, building, complex of buildings, or campus, with technology that provides a high-bandwidth, low-cost medium to which many computer nodes can be connected.

Laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) The laser is an intense light beam with very narrow bandwidth used in digital-imaging devices to produce images by electronic impulses from computers or facsimile transmission.

Layout The drawing or sketch of a proposed printed piece. In platemaking, a sheet indicating the settings for a step-and-repeat machine.

Leaders In composition, rows of dashes or dots (periods) to guide the eye across the page. Used in tabular work, programs, tables of contents, etc.

Leading (pronounced ledding) In composition, the distance between lines of type measured in points.

LED (Light Emitting Diodes) are used in place of lasers for some output systems.

Ledger paper A grade of business paper generally used for keeping records where it is subjected to appreciable wear so it requires a high degree of durability and permanence.

Letterspacing The placing of additional space between each letter of a word.

Line copy Any monochrome copy suitable for reproduction without using a halftone screen.

Local area network See LAN.

Logotype (or logo) The name of a company or product in a special design used as a trademark in advertising.

Long ink An ink that has good flow on ink rollers of a press. If the ink is too long, it breaks up into thin filaments on the press, and causes flying as on a newspaper press.

Lossless compression Lossless compression retains all pixel data for images and image integrity is retained. This type of compression is recommended for high-contrast images, line art, and text. Lossless compression techniques used for PDF files are ZIP, CCITT Group 3 and 4, and Run Length Encoding.

Lossy compression Lossy compression uses algorithms designed to compress the file by selectively removing portions of the images. The portions that are removed are the details that the human eye does not pick out very well, so it usually does a good job of removing data. Some of the image information (detail) is lost in this method however, and artifacts or noise may be picked up in some images. The lossy techniques that are available in Acrobat Distiller when making your PDF are JPEG, Subsampling, Downsampling, and Bi-cubic Downsampling.

Lowercase The small letters in type, as distinguished from the capital letters. The term is derived from the type case.

lpi (lines per inch) Acronym for lines per inch. Used as a measurement of resolution or halftone screening.