legibility
The quality of typeface affecting the speed of perception. Not to be confused with readability

lenticular printing
Printing technique that creates animation by taking 2 or more images and then interlacing the images using vertical strips from each image (so if you had 4 images a,b,c & d, you would have vertical strips of the picture abcdabcdabcd). Then this image is printed and a lenticular sheet is placed on top, which is a clear plastic corrugated sheet. Then as you move left and right in front of the printed result, you can see the different images.

leopard
Code name for Mac OS X 10.5

“less than” sign

LF
Abbreviation for LineFeed

LIFO
Abbreviation for Last In - First Out: a method of handling data in which the first element stored on a list or stack is also the last one to be retrieved.

ligature
A single glyph (character) designed to be used in place of a particular sequence of two (or more) glyphs. The most common, used in most fine typography, are the so-called “f-ligatures”: fi, fl, ff, ffi and ffl.

LILO
abbreviation for LInux LOader: Bootmanager included in most version of the Linux operating system that allows the user to select which operating system will be loaded at start-up.

line copy
Any artwork or type without continuous-tone gradations that can be photographed and reproduced without using a halftone screen.

line gauge
Also called a pica ruler or type gauge. Used to measure typography, and for copyfitting.

line pairs
An expression of resolving power. A line pair is composed of a line and an adjacent space of the same width as the line. A detector capable of defining more line pairs per unit length than another has greater resolving power. The same can be said of an image displaying more discrete line pairs per unit length than another. Occasionally the term is simply expressed as lines

linearity
A term expressing the proportional relationship of a desired response to the actual applied stimulus.

linearize
Adjust tone reproduction factors to render a unit ratio (1:1) between the desired values and the final result.

lines per inch
See line pairs

linespacing
Term used for leading in typesetting. Measured in points, from one baseline to the next baseline.

linotype
A typesetting machine that could cast an entire line of type in one slug. The machine was invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1890. Some newspapers and bookprinters kept them in production until the late 80’s!

lithography
A term describing the printing process where the image area and the non-image area co-exist on the same plane. This is in contrast to letterpress or gravure printing, where the image area is raised or depressed in relation to the non-image. The term lithography was derived from the Greek language, and literally means “stone writing.” In the beginning of the 19th century, lithography presses were built that used lithographic stones. Nowadays, offset lithography is the most common printing method used.

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