Reference

Glossary.

293 terms from the production floor.

Terms beginning with a number

100% print inspection in-line vision inspection of every unit, not a sample: Automated vision inspection built into the line that checks every unit as it runs, as opposed to pulling a sampled subset after the fact. It is the exact phrase label and narrow-web vendors like AVT and BST use for their own systems, a fact that says nothing about whether the same hardware has ever been deployed on a garment line.
3PL third-party logistics provider: A contractor that holds someone else's finished inventory and picks, packs and ships it against incoming orders, billing per receipt, per pallet per month, per pick and per parcel. A POD factory does none of that. It holds undecorated blanks, prints to the order, and the finished item never enters stock, so there is no put-away, no pick face and no cycle count. The line falls where an item exists before the order does: pre-printed runs, folded and bagged merch, kitted bundles of a shirt with a sticker pack and a card are 3PL work, while a one-off DTG shirt is not. Most shops find the boundary the hard way, when a bundle order splits across two origins with two tracking numbers and support cannot say where the other half is.

Terms beginning with A

Acid dye printing the dye class for nylon, silk and wool, printed as a paste then steamed and washed: The dye class that colours protein fibres and nylon, used by immersion or printed as a paste and then steamed to fix and washed to strip whatever did not take. Jacquard's own product page gives the working list, silk, wool, feathers, other protein fibres and nylons, and makes the point that trips people on the name: the acid is the vinegar or citric acid added to the bath, not the dye. It sits beside two entries here that cover the other fibre families, and they do not substitute for each other. Reactive dye printing bonds covalently to cotton, disperse dye needs a hydrophobic synthetic and travels as a gas, and acid dye works where the fibre offers sites it can hold. Nylon turns up on more than one of those lists, which is where jobs go wrong, so settle the fastness the customer expects before the dye class is picked. The steamer and the wash-off line are the real cost: a shop quoting acid printing without them is quoting someone else's plant, and the unsteamed sample that looked right comes back pale from the first wash.
Ad valorem tariff duty charged as a percentage of the declared customs value: A duty stated as a percentage of the customs value, so it moves with what the goods are worth. The alternative is a specific duty, a fixed amount per unit of quantity (per kilogram, per dozen, per litre), which ignores price entirely, and some tariff lines carry one of each stacked together. Apparel is mostly ad valorem: the HTSUS general rate on knitted cotton T-shirts, subheading 6109.10.00, is 16.5% (USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule). Because the base is a declared value, the figure a shop writes on the commercial invoice is a duty decision rather than paperwork, and customs reads it that way. On an inbound pallet of blanks the value is what the shop paid the supplier, not what the shirts will sell for after printing, and getting that wrong scales straight into the duty line because the rate is a percentage of it.
Adhesion promoter a primer coat that gives ink a grip on plastics it would otherwise peel straight off: An adhesion promoter is a thin primer laid on a substrate before printing so the cured ink bonds to a surface it would otherwise only sit on top of. Low surface energy plastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene are non-polar and barely let ink wet out, so the cured film is held by very little; the promoter bridges that gap, keying into the plastic on one side and into the ink on the other. It works differently from corona or flame treatment, which raises the energy of the plastic's own surface rather than adding a layer, and no preparation lasts indefinitely: corona-treated stock loses its effect in storage, and promoters carry a drying and over-print window that varies by product. Weak adhesion passes every check at the press and turns up later as a tape pull that lifts the graphic whole, or as a run of parts coming back after handling, with the substrate, the machine time and the reprint all on your side of the ledger.
Adobe RGB (1998) a wide-gamut RGB colour space, wider than sRGB: An RGB colour space with a wider gamut than sRGB, used by photographers and some fine-art labs. The same pixel values mean different colours in the two spaces, so the embedded profile decides what prints. Platforms mostly refuse it: Printful says RGB spaces other than sRGB, such as Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB, can cause unexpected color shifts, and ArtStation says Adobe RGB may make printed colours look dull next to the screen. Labs that drive their own printers can want it instead: SAIC's print bureau asks for Adobe RGB 1998. Keep the wide master for the lab that asks, and export an sRGB copy for every platform that names sRGB, because the mismatch never shows on the uploader's monitor.
In practice: Sublimation: Colour mode and embedded profile · Wall decor: Colour space: sRGB, Adobe RGB, or CMYK then RGB · Colour: Is sRGB or Adobe RGB better for printing?.
All-over print decoration that runs seam to seam, usually printed by the roll before the garment is cut: The fabric is printed first, by the roll, and the garment is cut and sewn out of it afterwards, so the image can cross a seam and run to the hem instead of stopping at a print area. On polyester the transfer step is a calender carrying paper and fabric through a heated drum together; that machine has its own entry here and is rarely the part that goes wrong. Platforms stretch the name further. Printful also sells All-Over Cotton, printed directly onto the fabric with water-based pigment inks and then cut and sewn the same way, and pre-made sublimated items printed after sewing, where seams and folds can leave minor white streaks. On the cut-and-sew route, what goes wrong sits either side of the print. Artwork has to be laid out panel by panel against the marker, with seam allowance, shrinkage and pattern direction settled before anything is printed, and the cutting room needs its own consumables, the marking paper, cutters kraft underlay, waxed kraft and separating tissue that Beaver Paper sells as a cut-and-sew line. There is no single-garment reprint in this process: a colour shift or a mismatched panel is found at the sewing machine, by which point the yardage, the cutting labour and the machine time are already spent.
In practice: All-over print: All-over print template: one per panel and product.
Alpha channel the per-pixel opacity a PNG carries and a JPEG does not: The channel in an image file that stores how opaque each pixel is, from fully transparent to fully solid. On DTG and DTF it is the instruction for where white ink goes, because the RIP builds the underbase or the film's white layer from it. A JPEG has none, and Printify warns that it forces a solid background, usually white, which prints as a box round the design on a dark shirt. The values between empty and solid are where shops lose money: Printify describes a 30% transparent pixel getting a 100% solid white dot underneath it, which turns a soft glow into a chalky halo. RIPs do not agree on this, since CADlink offers an Adaptive mode that scales white density by opacity, a Valid Pixel method and a switch that treats every semi-transparent pixel as opaque, and a seller cannot see which one the shop runs. On a garment the safe file has exactly two kinds of pixel, and a shadow that has to fade is built as a halftone. Wall prints want the opposite, because they are full coverage: SAIC asks for files flattened with no alpha channels, Gelato recommends flattening all transparencies, and Printful names JPEG for full-coverage posters and canvas.
In practice: DTG printing: Transparency and alpha · DTF: Transparency and alpha · Wall decor: Transparency and alpha · UV printing: Transparency and alpha · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Transparency and alpha · Stickers: Transparency and alpha · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Transparency and alpha · All-over print: Transparency and alpha.
AMR autonomous mobile robot: Autonomous mobile robot; in “swarm” sortation (swarm sortation), dozens of small robots carry pieces to order chutes (Libiao, Geek+).
Anti-aliasing the partly transparent pixels a design application adds to smooth an edge: The smoothing a design application applies to curves and diagonals by giving the border pixels in-between values, in colour or in opacity. On screen it removes jagged steps. On DTG and DTF it leaves a ring of semi-transparent pixels round every shape, and the RIP decides what happens to it: Printify says the machine reads any pixel that is not transparent as ink it needs to lay down, while CADlink has a Valid Pixel Tolerance option written to keep underbase off errant pixels such as anti-aliasing. Export over a coloured background and the ring carries that colour with it, which presses as a faint outline in the wrong colour. Switching smoothing off altogether gives stair-stepped curves and ragged small type instead, so the fix is a clean edge on a truly transparent background at full print size, checked in the alpha channel before the file goes to the queue.
In practice: DTF: Transparency and alpha.
Anti-dye-migration chemistry blocker layers printed between a polyester garment and the image, to keep the garment's own dye out of it: A barrier laid between fabric and image, so that when heat sets a polyester garment's own dye moving there is something in its way. In screen printing that is a blocker base rather than a white one: FN-INK sells its Barrier Black as a carbon blocker base and argues that a white base makes the weaker wall. How it is printed decides whether it works at all. The same page describes the failure that follows a bad choke: if the top white overlaps the blocker and touches the fabric, colour creeps up that edge and halos into the print, days after the boxes went out. On the digital side, Kornit lists Karbon Shield with a jetted blocker it calls DigiBlocker and claims it removes dye migration in both direct-to-polyester and direct-to-film work. Chemistry is one lever and heat is the other, so a blocker does not license a dryer running hotter than the blank can take, which is what low-cure ink exists for.
Anti-static film DTF film treated so the sheets stop clinging to each other and misfeeding: DTF transfer film carrying a surface treatment that lets static charge bleed away instead of building up, so sheets separate cleanly rather than gripping each other and the machine. PET is an insulator, and every contact-and-separation step in slitting, stacking and feeding lays charge on it that the film cannot shed; adjacent layers then pull toward each other until a stack of sheets behaves like one slab. It reads as a feeder fault, so the rollers and the pickup pressure get adjusted first, and the real tell is that it gets worse as the line runs faster rather than better. A double feed puts two sheets under the heads at once, and the wasted film costs almost nothing next to the print head it strikes, which is a machine down and a service call.
APPE Adobe PDF Print Engine: Adobe's licensed PDF rendering core, which most commercial RIPs (Caldera and ColorGATE among them) build on instead of writing their own PDF interpreter. When a RIP release leads with an APPE version number, that number describes the shared engine underneath, not the vendor's own code. Two RIPs on the same APPE build rasterize a PDF the same way; the difference between them is the workflow wrapped around it.
ArtSure the Fine Art Trade Guild's registration scheme for digital fine art prints: The Fine Art Trade Guild's scheme for registering digital fine art prints that meet its print standards, used by printers and artists to back a limited-edition or archival claim with something a buyer can check. The Guild lists the requirements: lightfastness of 6 or more on the Blue Wool Scale in all areas of the print, a substrate pH of 7-9, a substrate of at least 250 gsm, and only inks approved by the printer manufacturer, from materials tested in a UKAS laboratory or an international equivalent. It sets no ink count. The mistake is selling prints as archival or museum grade on the strength of the paper box alone. When a customer or a gallery asks for the test data behind the claim, a shop that cannot produce it has to pull the wording from every listing that used it, and refund whoever bought on it.
In practice: Wall decor: Archival paper.
AS/RS automated storage and retrieval system: Racking plus machines that put stock away and bring it back without anyone walking to a shelf: aisle cranes, shuttles in a rack face, or robots driving over a grid of stacked bins. Goods-to-person names where the operator stands, AS/RS names the storage that feeds them, and because most current systems do both, the two get used as if they were one word. For a POD plant the case is rarely picking speed. It is that blanks in dozens of sizes, colors and cuts stop eating floor: Exotec's Skypod stacks to 45 feet and quotes up to 600 bins an hour at each station, and AutoStore builds comparable density from bins on a grid. The figure that decides whether the investment earns its keep is presentations per hour at the station, not storage capacity, because presentations are what the print and pack lines consume. The failure is buffer arithmetic: an AS/RS that stores blanks beautifully will still starve a press if the induction points downstream cannot absorb what it delivers.
Attributed order an order the platform credits to an ad click, which is what makes the fee chargeable: On Etsy an order is attributed when a buyer clicks an Offsite Ad for one of your listings and then buys from your shop within 30 days. The purchase does not have to be the advertised item. Anything from your shop inside that window counts, and a single click can produce several attributed orders, each carrying its own advertising fee. If the buyer's last click before checkout was an Etsy Ad instead, only the Etsy Ads fee applies. Sellers read the window as one fee per click and price for that; the statement arrives with a fee on the repeat order too, and on the custom piece the same buyer ordered a fortnight later.
Auto-bagger a machine that drops a folded garment into a polybag and heat-seals it: The last machine before weigh-and-label: a folded garment is fed in, a bag is formed from a roll or taken from a stack of pre-made bags, and the seal is made and trimmed. This is the automation a mid-size POD shop buys years before it looks at robots, because it removes a manual station that every single order has to pass through. The published rates are not quoted on the same basis: ROQ's BAG is specified at 600 garments an hour on pre-made bags, and M&R's AB-9000 at up to 18 roll-fed bags a minute, with a maximum bag size of 30 x 38 cm. The mistake is sizing the line to the folder rather than the bagger: ROQ's own FOLD is rated at 700 pieces an hour against the BAG's 600, so the line runs at 600 and the folder waits. Bag size is the constraint that bites late, because a bagger comfortable with a folded tee will refuse a folded hoodie, and the shop finds this out in Q4.
Automatic color change the machine sliding its needle case to the next thread without an operator: On a multi-needle machine each needle carries a different thread, and a color change is the head sliding the needle case sideways so the next color comes over the fabric, with the old thread trimmed and locked on the way. Tajima's TMEZ single head, for one, is specified with 14 needles and automatic needle bar change on color changes within the design (Tajima TMEZ-SC1401, Hirsch specification). What it buys is unattended running: a twelve-color logo on a fifteen-needle machine never asks the operator anything, while the same file on a six-needle machine turns every color past the sixth into a manual re-thread across every head. Color count, not stitch count, is therefore what decides whether a multi-head can be left alone, and it is the number to read before quoting a design as machine time. Changes are not free either, since each one is head movement plus a trim and a tie-in, so a file sequenced into eight color blocks runs slower than the same design merged into four on identical hardware.
Automatic press an indexing screen-print carousel where the machine moves the shirt and pulls the stroke: A screen-printing carousel whose pallets are moved station to station by a servo-driven indexer and whose printheads pull the stroke themselves, as against a manual carousel where an operator does both by hand. They are configured by colour count: M&R lists its Sportsman EX 4045 in 6, 8, 10 and 12 colour models with a 41 x 46 cm maximum image area. What the machine buys is labour per piece, because one person loads and the press sets the pace; what it costs is setup, because every colour is another screen to burn, register and reclaim. Shops buy colour stations they cannot hold in register, or a press their loading and their dryer cannot feed, and an automatic idles at exactly the rate you can put shirts on it. The number that decides whether it earns its keep is the run length at which setup is amortised, and that moves with changeover time rather than with the impressions per hour on the spec sheet.

Terms beginning with B

Banding repeating streaks from head misalignment or an uneven feed: Evenly spaced stripes across a print, caused by printhead misalignment or an uneven media feed rather than by a blocked nozzle. It looks like nozzle dropout to an untrained eye, and the two fixes point in opposite directions: dropout wants a clean or a purge, banding wants a calibration and a feed check. Run the wrong one and you burn a shift with the streaks still there.
Barcode zone the area of a book's back cover kept clear for the ISBN barcode: A block on the back cover where the printer's barcode goes or where a supplied barcode must sit. IngramSpark makes barcodes mandatory on the back of every cover, 100% black on a white box or background, places one if the file has none, and asks for a 1.75 x 1 in area left free. KDP's hardcover page says a barcode you supply must be 2 in (50.8 mm) wide and 1.2 in (30.5 mm) high at 300 dpi, at least 0.76 in (19 mm) from the bottom of the cover and at least 0.25 in (6 mm) from the spine hinge; if you supply none, KDP puts its own in a white box of that size at the lower right of the back cover and prints over anything beneath it. KDP's paperback page shows a barcode margin in its template, says it keeps the barcode from shifting during printing so that it scans, and also places a barcode when the file has none. The two platforms give different sizes, 1.75 x 1 in against 2 x 1.2 in. Anything important inside the zone is covered, so keep text and art out of it, as with the safe area.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Cover template and barcode zone.
Batching: Grouping jobs to minimize changeovers (same product, color, palette). Dynamic batching = grouping on the fly from the API stream.
Black knockout leaving black out of the print so a black garment supplies it: Removing black and near-black from the artwork before it prints on a black garment, so the shirt itself becomes the black and no ink or white goes down there. In CADlink Digital Factory it is a filter, KnockMeBlackOut, with a Clean black option that turns near-black to black first so more area drops out; the tool page adds a tolerance slider that sets the cut point between what prints and what turns transparent. Knockout is not a reason to strip white from the dark tones that stay in the print: CADlink's underbase strength page says most DTG needs some white under black areas for the shirt to wash properly, with presets that run from 100% white under black down to 0%. It is a print shop setting, not something the seller switches on, and the seller's only lever is leaving the area transparent in the file. Shops get it wrong at both ends. Skip it and black on black prints over a full underbase, which Printify says can come out grayish or dull; drop the tolerance too low and dark shadows and navy outlines vanish into the shirt, a fault nobody sees until the garment is off the dryer.
In practice: DTG printing: DTG on a black shirt: black on black.
Blanks: Undecorated base products, decoration's raw material: garments (Gildan, Stanley/Stella, etc.) and, in sublimation, polymer-coated hard goods such as a ceramic mug, where an uncoated blank leaves the dye nothing to bond to.
Bleed artwork extended past the trim line so the cut never shows bare paper: The strip of artwork that runs past the trim line and is cut off after printing, there so that a cut slightly off position lands in image rather than in white paper. Gelato requires 4 mm on all sides of a print-ready PDF, and Prodigi says photo prints typically have 3 mm. Not every product wants the same strip: on canvas the band that wraps the bars is a separate and much larger allowance, worked in the stretcher bar entry. Gelato prints most drinkware exactly as supplied but requires 2 mm top and bottom on an 11 oz ceramic mug, and on Printify's all-over products the bleed goes into the inner seams instead of the bin. A DTG shirt has no trim and no bleed at all. The common failure is a file built to the exact product size and sent to a lab that cuts, which Gelato flags because it leaves unwanted white borders on the finished piece. A white hairline down one edge is enough for a return on wall art, and the reprint costs the paper, the ink and a second shipping label.
In practice: Sublimation: Bleed and safe zone · Wall decor: Bleed and safe zone · Screen printing: Bleed and safe zone · UV printing: Bleed, wrap and safe zone · HTV and vinyl: Bleed and registration marks · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Bleed and safe zone: KDP and other book printers · Stickers: Sticker bleed size: bleed, border and safe zone · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Bleed and safe zone · All-over print: Bleed and safe zone · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Trim, bleed and marks in the PDF: book printers · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Trim and bleed in the PDF: wall decor and RIP settings.
Blue Wool Scale eight dyed wool references, 1 to 8, that a print's fading is rated against: A set of wool cloths dyed blue to known lightfastness, numbered from 1 for very low to 8 for very high, exposed to light beside a sample so its fading can be rated by comparison; the method sits in ISO 105-B02. PermaJet publishes one such certificate for an inkjet paper, run under a xenon arc lamp against references 2 to 6, and states that Blue Wool 6 is the accepted standard for limited edition inkjet prints; the Fine Art Trade Guild asks for 6 or more in all areas of the print. A rating is a rank against the references, not a number of years on a wall; the same PermaJet certificate equates its 6 to an 85-year display life, but that conversion is the laboratory's assumption about light levels, not part of the scale, and sellers quote the years as if the scale had produced them. It also belongs to the ink and paper pair that was tested, so a result earned on one stock does not travel to a cheaper one bought later. Claim it on the wrong pair and the claim fails at the first faded print sent back from a sunny room.
In practice: Wall decor: Archival paper.
bluesign a Swiss system that certifies textile production processes, not factories or finished goods: bluesign assesses the production processes behind a material or a chemical product, and its own page states the limit without hedging: bluesign certifies production processes, not facilities as entities or finished products themselves. bluesign APPROVED was therefore never a badge on a factory. It attached to an article, meaning a fabric, trim or accessory, or to a chemical product, assessed on site across six areas of responsibility: product stewardship, resource productivity, environmental protection, occupational health and safety, emergency preparedness and social responsibility. From April 2026 bluesign is replacing bluesign APPROVED and bluesign PRODUCT with a unified bluepass mark, moving consumer-facing labels by 27 September 2026 to meet the EU Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition directive, with existing labels staying valid where already in use. When a blank supplier says the mill is “bluesign certified”, that sentence has never matched anything bluesign issues; the answerable question is which article or which chemical product carries the mark.
Bobbin tension the drag on the lower thread in an embroidery machine: Bobbin tension is the drag on the lower thread as it leaves the bobbin case, and it is what the needle thread pulls against so the stitch locks inside the fabric rather than on one face. Set it before top tension, and judge it on a stitched satin column: the underside should show about a third bobbin thread down the centre, top thread either side. The lock travels toward whichever thread pulls harder, so too much bobbin tension drags it to the underside and narrows that stripe, and too little lets the needle thread haul bobbin color up onto the face. Lint packed under the tension spring shifts the setting on its own, so a head that ran clean yesterday breaks today, and every break is a stopped machine plus a garment that may already need stitches picked out.
Bulk piezo a printhead whose actuator is machined from sintered PZT ceramic rather than grown as a film: Bulk piezo is the older and still dominant printhead construction, in which the actuator is sintered PZT ceramic machined into channel walls rather than a film deposited on a wafer (see thin-film piezo for how the two are made). What separates one bulk head from another is how the wall is driven. In shear mode the field runs across the poling direction and a single piece of poled ceramic deforms sideways; Xaar's chevron mode fuses two oppositely poled pieces so the wall bends at the join, and its shared-wall design lets one wall fire either of the two channels it sits between, which is how channel density rises without thinning the ceramic. In that mode the walls flex at roughly 150 kHz and it is the acoustic wave running along the channel, not the wall movement by itself, that ejects the drop. The practical consequence is uniformity: drop volume and velocity vary from nozzle to nozzle across a bulk array, which is why vendors ship per-nozzle waveform and voltage trimming, and an array that has drifted out of trim prints density steps at the head joins that no color profile will correct.

Terms beginning with C

Calender a heated roller press that runs fabric through roll to roll, used to transfer sublimation prints: A calender is a heated cylinder press that runs goods through roll to roll, and in decoration it is the machine that carries sublimation transfer paper and fabric through the drum together under continuous pressure. Paper and goods unwind, meet at the drum, and separate on the far side, where the spent paper rewinds and the printed fabric comes off as a finished roll, so temperature and dwell are set by drum heat and line speed rather than by an operator closing a press. It only works on polyester and polymer-coated goods, because the dye moves as a gas and needs a synthetic fiber to lodge in; cotton comes out pale and washes clean. Uneven drum temperature across the working width is the failure that hurts, because it stripes a color shift down a whole roll before anyone at the cutting table sees a finished panel.
Capping station the seal that keeps idle nozzles wet: The rubber-lipped cap that seals a printhead's nozzle plate when the machine sits idle, holding humidity around the nozzles so ink does not dry inside them. Caps wear, tear, and collect dried ink, and a cap that no longer seals is a common cause of dropout across a whole head after a weekend. It fails quietly: the first sign is a streaked print on Monday, not an alarm.
Case binding building the hardcover separately and gluing the book block into it: Case binding makes the cover as its own object, boards and spine and covering material assembled away from the book, and attaches it by pasting the text block's endpapers to the inside of the boards (Etherington and Roberts, case binding). That separation is what makes it a production method rather than a craft, because cases can be run ahead in quantity while the blocks are still being printed. Case wrap is the print-on-demand form of the covering, where the printed cover itself is laminated and folded around the boards instead of cloth carrying a jacket; Lulu sells it as casewrap with a glossy or matte finish and a stiff cover board (Lulu), and KDP's hardcover file carries a 0.51 inch wrap that folds around the case board plus a 0.4 inch hinge gap so the book can open (KDP hardcover cover specification). The cost sits in the case, not the paper: on Amazon.com a black-ink hardcover carries a $5.65 fixed cost (KDP hardcover printing cost) against $1.00 for the same paperback, on the same $0.012 per page (KDP paperback printing cost). That gap decides whether a hardcover edition is worth listing at all, and it is also why KDP stops hardcovers at 550 pages where the paperback runs to 828.
Case laminate (casewrap) a hardcover whose printed cover is wrapped around the boards instead of a dust jacket: A hardcover where the cover artwork is printed on one sheet that is laminated and wrapped round the case boards. The cover file needs more room than a paperback cover. IngramSpark calls these case laminate titles and asks for 0.625 in of bleed on all four sides "for wrapping purposes", against 0.125 in elsewhere. Lulu asks for a 0.75 in safety margin on a hardcover casewrap, against 0.25 in on other covers, and wants the cover as one PDF with back, spine and front. Hardcover casewrap is also where spine width comes from a table, not a formula. The book is case-bound, with the artwork carried on the case itself. Artwork stopped at the paperback bleed leaves the wrap short of the board edge, and text inside the paperback margin sits where the cover folds round the boards.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Hardcover: case laminate, hinge and wrap.
Casing-in gluing a text block into its hardcover case: The bookbinding step that glues a finished text block into its hardcover case, the moment a block becomes a hardback. It runs after the block is sewn or glued and before pressing forms the joint, and it is where hardback unit cost separates from a paperback's perfect binding. On single-copy work it is the finishing line, not the press, that sets the floor on price and lead time.
Ceramic decal a printed transfer fired onto glazed ware in a kiln: A transfer printed on paper coated with a water-release adhesive and fired onto ceramic. Milestone Decals says its decals are generally applied as a third firing on an already fired glaze: wet the decal, slide it off the backing paper onto clean ware, squeegee out water and air, then fire, very slowly below 500 °F (260 °C). Its schedules include a "Digital Food Safe Decal Firing" at cone 019. It is not a sublimation print: no dye goes into a coating, and the image is a layer on the glaze. Milestone says non-metallic decals are somewhat translucent and recommends white or light ware to keep their density. Its document says nothing on mirroring, resolution or colour mode, so file rules have to come from the maker. On a dark mug the same artwork prints thin, and no change to the file corrects that.
In practice: Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Process rows: sublimation press, UV rotary and ceramic decal.
Changeover time the minutes a machine is down between two jobs: The minutes a machine produces nothing while it is switched from one job to the next: ink or screen swap, platen change, pretreat setting, purge, test print, first-piece check. It is the number that sets the shortest run worth putting on that machine, and the reason two identical presses can post very different daily output. Batching exists to spend it once instead of once per order.
Chargeback a card payment reversed by the issuing bank at the cardholder's request: The cardholder disputes a charge with their bank, the money is pulled back out of the merchant account, and the merchant gets a fixed window to answer with evidence or lose the sale and a fee on top. Visa's public rulebook files disputes by condition, among them 10.4 for card-absent fraud, 13.1 for merchandise not received, and 13.3 for not as described or defective (Visa Core Rules and Visa Product and Service Rules). A personalised print defends all three from a weak position. Proof of delivery answers 13.1 and nothing else; a 13.3 argument is about a colour, a placement or a spelling the buyer supplied; and because the item is worth nothing to anyone but the buyer, the standard merchant move of offering to take it back is not an offer. What wins is the file built before the piece printed: the approved proof, the timestamp on that approval, the artwork as uploaded, and a photograph of the finished item.
Children's Product Certificate the US certificate a decorator acquires by importing rather than by manufacturing: A CPC certifies that a children's product complies with every applicable US children's product safety rule, based on testing by a CPSC-accepted third party conformity assessment body. The CPSIA tracking label is the mark on the garment; this is the paper behind it, and they are separate duties that shops treat as one. Who owes it is the trap: 16 CFR 1110.7 puts the obligation on the importer for a finished product manufactured outside the United States, so a shop buying blank children's tees from abroad has taken on the certificate whether or not it calls itself a manufacturer. The certificate has to name the rules, the testing body with its address, and the date and place of testing, which means it cannot be written after an inspector asks for it. A decorator leaning on the blank supplier's certificate is leaning on a document about the blank, and the print is what the rules are about.
Choke pulling the white underbase a few pixels inside the colour edge: A RIP setting that shrinks the white layer so it stops short of the colour edge, whether the colour is printed over the white on a DTG garment or under it on DTF film. CADlink Digital Factory states the arithmetic plainly: a choke of 2 pulls the underbase 2 pixels closer to the bounds of the job, and the same help page keeps one choke field for white drawn in the design and another for white generated in the queue, so setting one leaves the other untouched. DTF Dallas puts the usual default at 1-2 pixels. Two faults look alike. White showing evenly past every colour edge is the RIP's own layer, and the fix sits in the queue; a chalky ring only where the art had soft edges, glows or shadows comes from the file, because Printify describes a 30% transparent pixel getting a 100% solid white dot under it. Asking the customer for new art in the first case wastes a day, and widening the choke in the second changes nothing. Set it too wide instead and fine type and thin strokes lose their white entirely, so colour on a dark garment goes dull exactly where the detail is. Either way the halo is found after the press, on a garment or a transfer that is already spoiled.
In practice: DTG printing: White handling · DTF: White handling · Screen printing: Trapping and choke · UV printing: UV-DTF film: choke, bleed, spacing and cut lines.
CMYK cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black), the ink colour mode: The colour mode that describes a pixel as amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink. Every print path ends there, often with white or extra inks added, so the argument is only about who converts. Printful says converting before upload can unnecessarily reduce the available color information, and Printify tells sellers to preview in CMYK and then undo the change. Some DTF shops want the reverse: Transfer Kingdom requires CMYK and auto-converts RGB with a warning that colours may differ, and Transfer Superstars asks for a FOGRA39 conversion before submitting. A PNG cannot hold CMYK at all, as Fourthwall points out, so a shop asking for CMYK is also asking for a different file format. Whoever converts first decides the gamut, and a file converted for one shop and reused at another carries that loss to both.
In practice: DTG printing: DTG in RGB or CMYK: sRGB upload, CMYK gamut · DTF: DTF in RGB or CMYK: upload RGB, or convert to CMYK first · Sublimation: Design in CMYK (Redbubble) or design in RGB and only preview CMYK (Printify) · Wall decor: Colour space: sRGB, Adobe RGB, or CMYK then RGB · Screen printing: Colour mode and profile · Embroidery: Colour mode and profile · UV printing: Colour mode and profile · HTV and vinyl: Colour mode and line colour · Colour: Dull or shifted colour after a CMYK or wide-gamut upload · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Colour mode and profile · Stickers: Colour mode and profile · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Colour mode and embedded profile.
Cold-peel film DTF transfer film whose carrier only comes away once the sheet has cooled on the garment: DTF transfer film whose release lets go only after the pressed sheet has cooled on the garment, where hot-peel film comes off straight out of the press. The wait is the mechanism: the adhesive sets while it is still under pressure and against the fabric, which tends to leave a flatter, more matte face and is more forgiving under a heavy white lay than pulling hot. It also puts a queue into every press cycle, so on a busy afternoon somebody peels early, the fine detail tears, and the film gets the blame. Most film now sells as dual hot and cold peel rather than one or the other, and one supplier's line will list dedicated cold-peel rolls next to instant hot-and-cold rolls, so the label on the box does not settle how it behaves on your press. A film change is a press-setting change, and the only thing that establishes the peel window is a test press before the run, not after it.
Color gamut the range of colors a given ink, cloth and press can actually reach: A color gamut is the set of colors one specific combination of ink, substrate and press can actually produce, measured rather than assumed. Anything outside it has to be pulled back inside that boundary before it prints, which is why an out-of-gamut orange or navy comes back flatter than the file, and why the same artwork lands differently on two garment colors. The gamut belongs to the whole system, not the printer: change the blank, the ink set or the underbase and the boundary moves with them. Shops pay for that at approval, when a customer signs off on a screen, rejects the sample and takes a remade sample plus a pushed ship date, because no amount of ink adjustment reaches a color the system was never able to make.
In practice: Colour: Dull or shifted colour after a CMYK or wide-gamut upload.
Color separation splitting the art into one printing plate, film or channel per ink: Breaking a design into one layer per ink so each can be printed on its own: a film and a screen per colour in screen printing, a named channel per specialty ink on a UV or DTF RIP. ONYX counts it in plates: a process document has four, and every spot colour adds one, so CMYK plus one spot is five. Screen shops choose between methods, and the method sets the film. The UltraSeps output sheet runs simulated process and CMYK at 55 LPI, basic spot colours with no tints at 300 LPI, and index separations with no frequency, angle or dot shape at all, because index art is square pixels rather than halftone dots. CADlink FilmMaker adds a second fork: separations made in the design application and imported, or made in the RIP. The seller rarely separates the file, but the file decides what is possible. A flattened JPEG of a photo has to be separated as raster, by simulated process, CMYK or index, and cannot go as clean spot colour; a soft drop shadow in otherwise flat art has to be halftoned into the screens around it. Ask which method the shop runs before the art is final, not after the films are burned.
In practice: Screen printing: How the process treats your file · UV printing: UV printing white ink and varnish: white and varnish channels · Colour: Screen printing: RGB working files and separations.
Compatible ink third-party ink sold to run in another manufacturer's machine: Ink made by somebody other than the machine's manufacturer and sold to drop straight into that machine's system; STS, for one, describes its whole business as inks compatible with most major brands of large-format printer. Three things are exposed and shops usually count only the first: the warranty and the service contract, then head life, because a printhead is a filtered fluid path tuned to one ink's viscosity, surface tension and pigment grind, then every ICC profile and linearisation on the RIP, all of which describe the old ink and stop describing the machine the day the fluid changes. The consumer folklore does not reach a production floor. The tie-in prohibition that stops a manufacturer voiding a warranty over third-party supplies lives in the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, and the FTC's own guide limits that Act to consumer products, meaning property normally used for personal, family or household purposes, and says it does not apply to products sold for commercial purposes. A production DTG or DTF printer is not one. The saving is counted per litre and the loss is counted per printhead, plus the days the line stands still waiting for one, so the defensible version is a documented trial: one machine, a fresh profile, wash-tested prints, and only then the second machine.
COSHH control of substances hazardous to health, the UK duty to assess exposure and then control it: COSHH is the UK counterpart to HazCom, and the difference is the shape of the duty: it is not a list of banned chemicals, it is an obligation to assess and control. What the regulations cover is broad on purpose: anything with a workplace exposure limit, anything classified as irritant, harmful, corrosive or worse, biological agents, and ordinary dust above the stated concentrations. The catch for a print shop is that the assessment must also cover substances your own process creates. Powder from a DTF shaker, mist off a heat press, fume from an unvented cure tunnel: none of that arrives in a labelled drum, so none of it is in the SDS binder. HSE's control order is eliminate, change the process, contain, then control, with PPE last rather than first, and a shop that reached straight for gloves and a mask has not done a COSHH assessment. It has bought PPE, and an inspector reads the difference in about a minute.
Cost per print what one finished piece really consumes, maintenance and thrown-away sheets included: Cost per print is what a single finished piece actually consumes: ink, film, powder or emulsion, the blank if you supply it, printer and press time, and its share of keeping the machine alive. Most shops quote consumables per square foot and stop there, which is the easy half of the figure. The rest is spending the printer takes whether or not the day was busy, including purge and cleaning cycles, wipers, filters, capping stations, an eventual printhead, and the sheets binned at start-up before the white lays down evenly. Price off the easy half and every job reads as profitable while the machine quietly runs at a loss, which you find out on the day a head fails and nothing has been set aside to replace it.
CPSIA tracking label the US permanent tracking-label rule for children's products: Section 103 of the US Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act requires a permanent mark on children's products, apparel for ages 12 and under included, identifying the manufacturer, the location and date of production, and the batch or run. A one-off print has no obvious batch, which is exactly why POD sellers of kids' apparel miss it. The rule attaches to the product, so it is a labeling and blank-sourcing question before it is a printing one.
Crocking color rubbing off a finished print onto skin or another fabric: Color transferring off a finished print by rubbing, onto skin, a car seat, or the white shirt worn underneath. It is measured rather than eyeballed: a crockmeter rubs a white test cloth across the print under set conditions, and the grade comes from how much color ended up on that cloth, not from how the print looks afterwards (AATCC TM8 and TM116, ISO 105-X12). Dry and wet are separate runs, so a piece can pass one and fail the other. What transfers is pigment that never bound to the fiber, which makes a failure a process problem, and it reaches you as a complaint and a returned batch after the whole run has shipped.
Cross-hatch adhesion test cutting a grid through the ink, taping over it and pulling, to see what lifts: A lattice of cuts is scored through the ink down to the substrate, pressure-sensitive tape is rubbed down over the grid and pulled off, and whatever lifts with it is compared against reference pictures. Two standards cover it on opposite scales: ASTM D3359 Test Method B rates 5B down to 0B with 5B as nothing removed, while ISO 2409 rates 0 to 5 with 0 as the good end. They are similar but not technically equivalent, and the details that move the answer differ, including cut spacing set by film thickness, tape pulled at 180 degrees against roughly 60 degrees, and a dwell of 90 seconds against five minutes. D3359 is written for metallic substrates, so a bare claim that a plastic or glass panel passed the cross-hatch, with no standard, spacing or rating attached, is worth nothing when the customer's lab runs the other scale and rejects the batch you already shipped.
Cure tunnel / conveyor dryer a heated tunnel that cures prints as a belt carries them through: Inline curing hardware: a variable-speed belt carries printed pieces through a heated chamber, so dwell is set by chamber length and belt speed rather than by an operator holding a press closed. That is the split from a flat heat press, which cures one piece at a time by contact and pressure, while the tunnel runs a stream of them under infrared or forced hot air. Shops profile a dryer with a probe whose wires contact the ink directly, because it is the ink film that has to reach cure temperature, not the air around it. Trust the panel reading instead and a whole shift goes through undercured, looking finished right up to the first wash, which is a day's output back as returns and a reprint.
Cut line (cut contour) the vector path a sticker cutter follows, flagged by a spot colour name: The path the cutter follows. StickerApp defines it as the path the machine follows when it cuts the sticker, so it decides the final shape, and asks for a fully closed vector shape drawn as a 1 pt stroke in 100% magenta spot colour named "die cut". The name that marks the path differs by shop and RIP. Mimaki RasterLink 7 reads the spot colour prefixed "CutContour", and allows a suffix so one file can hold several cut paths with different cutting conditions. Sticker Mule recommends a 0.05 to 1 pt magenta stroke and says the line does not need to be on a separate layer or named "cut line". The Fiery XF procedure asks for a closed contour, a stroke with no fill, and Overprint Stroke (see overprint). One file does not satisfy all of these without renaming the swatch. A path with the wrong name is either ignored by the cutter or printed as a magenta line.
In practice: Stickers: Sticker cut line: path form, colour, name and layer.
Cut-and-sew garments printed as flat fabric panels, then cut and stitched into the product: The route for all-over prints that must reach every surface of a garment. Threadless explains that its cut-and-sew tee is sublimation-printed onto fabric and then sewn together; the tee is assembled from five sections but has seven printable areas, and it takes one art file for all sizes, scaled to the garment, on a template of 9038 x 8148 px (60.253 x 54.32 in). It adds that all cuts may have around a 1 in margin of error, so the material can show more or less of the design than the template. Subliminator's blog says panel proportions change with every size, so an alignment drawn for one size would be wrong on the others, and names the seam allowance, the strip folded inward and stitched, as the part of each panel that does not show on the finished garment: an element placed in it disappears. Neither page states an allowance in millimetres or inches, so that value comes from the template. A design that must sit exactly on a seam is at the mercy of the cut margin. See all-over print for the file itself.
In practice: All-over print: Print area and canvas size · All-over print: All-over print template: one per panel and product.
Cutaway stabilizer backing left under the stitches for the life of the garment: Cutaway stabilizer is backing hooped under the fabric, trimmed close after stitching and left in place permanently, so it goes on carrying the design for the life of the garment. It is the choice for knits and stretch goods, where the cloth cannot hold a dense design still by itself; tearaway is pulled off and leaves the fabric on its own. Weight has to match stitch density, because backing that is too light lets the design tunnel and pucker, and backing that is too heavy stiffens a soft tee and scratches the wearer. The failure usually shows after the first wash, when polos come back with distorted logos and the customer wants the order replaced, long after the run was invoiced.

Terms beginning with D

Damper the small ink reservoir between the ink line and the printhead: A small chamber mounted between the ink supply line and the printhead that regulates ink flow and traps air bubbles before they reach the nozzles. A failed or badly reseated damper is a direct cause of nozzle dropout, and because it sits inside the head assembly, replacing one usually means a technician visit, not an operator fix.
Dark cure / post-cure curing that keeps going after the piece has left the lamp: Polymerization that continues after the print or part is out from under the UV source, so what comes off the line has not yet reached its final hardness or adhesion. It is a cationic effect, not something to expect from the acrylate free-radical inks most UV printers run: free-radical cure needs continuous line-of-sight exposure and terminates in a fraction of a second, while a cationic system needs the lamp only to start it and then propagates for minutes, hours or even days. Post-cure is the wider word and carries a second meaning worth keeping straight: a deliberate secondary exposure, such as taking LED-cured chemistry to a UVC source, which you schedule rather than wait out. Test a cationic job the instant it leaves the lamp and the answer is wrong in both directions. Good work gets scrapped on an adhesion test it has not had time to pass, and a job cleared too early ships with its properties still moving, which comes back as a customer complaint.
DDP / DAP Delivered Duty Paid vs Delivered At Place: Two Incoterms that decide who pays import duty: under DDP the seller collects and remits it, usually at checkout, and under DAP the parcel arrives and the buyer has to pay the courier before it is released. Since the US suspended its de minimis exemption on Aug 29, 2025, low-value cross-border parcels owe duty too, so the difference now reaches ordinary POD orders. Shipping DAP without saying so is how a cheap parcel turns into a refused delivery and a chargeback.
De minimis: The US customs exemption for shipments under $800, ended in 2025 (CNBC · CBP). The direct-from-China advantage is gone.
Delegated act EU secondary legislation that fills in technical detail under a parent law: The instrument the European Commission uses to fill in technical detail under an existing EU law without a fresh Parliament and Council vote, and where the actual product requirements under ESPR get written. Its adoption date is not the compliance date: ESPR sets a general rule that a delegated act applies no earlier than 18 months after it enters into force. Reading the adoption year as the deadline undercounts by at least that much.
Delta E a single number for the distance between two colors: One number for how far apart two color samples are, the lower the closer, calculated by more than one formula (delta E76, delta E94, delta E2000), so a stated tolerance means nothing until someone says which. An ICC profile gets a print near the target color; Delta E is the measurement that proves it landed inside what the client agreed to. It replaces an argument held under production-floor lighting with a reading.
Depalletizing breaking an inbound pallet down into cases or single units at goods-in: Taking cases off an incoming pallet and putting them onto a conveyor, a cart or a rack. In a POD plant it is the first touch on every blank that enters the building, and in most shops it is still two people, a knife and a roll cage. Robotic versions use a vacuum or clamp head with 3D vision to find the top layer, then either lift a whole layer or pick case by case; Boston Dynamics' Stretch works through neat or messy stacks at up to 50 lb a case, which is the class of problem that defeats a fixed layer picker. The argument for automating it is not speed, it is that goods-in owns both the lifting injuries and the shift-start bottleneck: nothing prints until blanks are on the racks, so a slow morning at the pallet sets the pace for everything after it. The common mistake is automating the lift and leaving the count manual, so the pallet comes down fast and the stock record is still wrong by Tuesday.
Die cut a cut through both the sticker and its backing liner, so each piece is separate: StickerApp describes a die-cut sticker as the sticker and its backing liner cut to shape together as an individual piece, against the kiss cut, where the liner stays whole. The file carries the same kind of path, a cut line, and the shop's setup decides what it does. In StickerApp's file setup for kiss-cut stickers the outer die-cut goes on its own layer, separate from the inner kiss-cut, and the die-cut layer is locked. The same shop wants a cut-line swatch named "die cut" (StickerApp cutlines). Fiery XF lists Die line and Through Cut among its ten default cut names, next to Kiss Cut (Fiery XF cut contours). A swatch named "die cut" is therefore a shop convention and not proof of what the job is: the product ordered decides that. A file prepared for one cut type and ordered as the other comes back with the wrong cut.
In practice: Stickers: Die cut versus kiss cut.
Digitizing: Turning artwork into a stitch file: path, sequence, underlay, pull compensation. A redraw, not a conversion. The same logo digitized by two people sews differently, and a bad file shows up as puckering rather than as a wrong colour.
In practice: Embroidery: File format and digitising.
Dimensional weight DIM weight, billing a parcel on the space it takes up rather than what it weighs: Length times width times height, divided by a number the carrier picks, gives a weight in pounds, and you are billed on that or the scale weight, whichever is higher. The divisor is the whole argument, because a larger one bills less air: USPS moved its DIM factor to 139 effective 12 July 2026, applied to pieces over one cubic foot (Federal Register 2026-09785). Private carriers set their own and publish them on their rate pages. POD shops meet this on boxed goods rather than polybagged shirts: a mug in a void-filled carton, a canvas in a tube, a framed print with corner protectors. The quote comes off the scale and the invoice comes off the tape measure, so the gap arrives weeks later as a carrier adjustment against orders already sold at a price the shop set.
Dimensioning / cubing measuring a parcel's length, width and height on the line: A gate, an overhead sensor or a static cube box measures a parcel's three dimensions as it moves, normally paired with an in-motion scale so cube and weight are captured in one pass. It decides the shipping bill, because carriers rate on whichever is greater, actual weight or dimensional weight, and they re-measure the parcel in their own hub and bill the difference back weeks later. In the United States a device used to work out freight, storage or postal charges is a legal-for-trade instrument under NIST Handbook 44, Section 5.58, Multiple Dimension Measuring Devices, which is why a dimensioner is sealed and certified and a tape measure on the packing bench is not. The failure specific to apparel POD is that a polybag has no fixed cube: a soft mailer measured flat on the belt and puffed up in a carrier hub produces a carrier adjustment nobody can reconstruct afterwards. A shop that does not dimension is not comparing quoted rate against billed rate at all, and that gap only ever moves one way.
Direct-to-object printing printing straight onto a finished three-dimensional item instead of onto a sheet: Inkjet printing straight onto a finished item such as a bottle, a phone case, a tile or a wooden panel, rather than onto film that is applied to the item afterwards. Machines built for it cure UV-LED ink as the lamp passes over the fresh drop, commonly carry a primer channel for surfaces the ink will not bond to on its own, and are bounded by a maximum object height and by how close the head can ride over a curved face. Registration is the difference from flat work. A jig holds the object, so every new shape needs its own fixture and its own height setting before the first good print, and a misfire scraps the blank instead of a sheet of media, which on customer-supplied goods is the expensive half of the job.
Discharge ink ink that carries a reducing agent to strip the garment's own dye instead of covering it: Discharge ink carries a sulfoxylate reducing agent that breaks down the garment's dye during curing, so the fabric's own fibers hold the image instead of a film of ink lying on top. The blank decides the result as much as the ink does: cotton dyed with reactive vinyl sulfone dyes drops back toward an off-white, vat dyes resist the paste, and plenty of garments land on a tan or pink nobody chose. It also needs full cure temperature to fire, so a cool dryer gives you a gray, half-discharged print. Test each dye lot before the run, because a blank that will not discharge still costs you the garments, the press time and the reprint.
Disperse dye the non-ionic dye class sublimation runs on, which only takes hold in hydrophobic synthetic fiber: Disperse dye is the class of non-ionic, barely water-soluble dyes made for hydrophobic synthetic fibers such as polyester, the polyamides including nylon, and cellulose acetate, and sublimation transfer requires it. Under heat the dye migrates into the amorphous regions of the polymer, above the fiber's glass transition, and is held there by van der Waals and hydrophobic forces rather than by a chemical bond, which is why the color ends up inside the fiber instead of on top of it. Cotton offers none of that: cellulose is hydrophilic, it does not soften at press temperature the way polyester does, and a non-ionic dye has almost no affinity for it, so a sublimated image on cotton sits on the surface and washes out fast. That is why the poly count belongs on the order form and not in the operator's head, because the complaint comes back weeks later from the customer's laundry, long after your QC signed the box.
Display Permanence Rating DPR — Wilhelm Imaging Research's figure for how long one ink and media pair holds before fading is noticeable: A WIR Display Permanence Rating is a number of years, published by Wilhelm Imaging Research for one specific ink and media combination, before fading or a shift in color balance becomes noticeable. It is not one number but three, because the rating is published per display condition: prints framed under glass, prints framed behind a UV filter, and prints displayed unframed under bare-bulb illumination, with a separate album and dark-storage rating alongside them. The years come from accelerated light-fading tests extrapolated to an assumed display condition of 450 lux for 12 hours a day, which is an assumption about someone's wall rather than a measurement of it. ISO test methods for print permanence exist, and WIR sits on the ISO group writing them, but the same reports are blunt that no ISO or ANSI specification standard exists for turning a test result into a lifetime or noticeable-change prediction under a standardized set of display and storage conditions. They show what that gap costs: Kodak's assumption of 120 lux alone made its display-life predictions 3.75 times greater than those from WIR and other manufacturers. So a shop quoting bare years to a wall-art customer is quoting an assumption. Quote the display condition with the number, or wait for the complaint from the person who hung the print in a window.
Donut probe a contact thermometer with a ring-shaped tip that reads the ink's own temperature, not the air's: A contact thermocouple with a ring-shaped tip that is set into the printed ink layer and reads the temperature of the ink itself as the print heats. It measures at the junction of two fine crossed wires, and those wires have to be buried in the deposit; sitting on top of it, they read the air around the print instead. An infrared gun reads reflected heat off the surface and can show a number well above what the ink has actually reached, which is how a print that hit cure temperature on the gun still washes out. Verifying with the gun alone lets a shop run a full shift undercured and learn about it weeks later, through returns, on work that is already invoiced.
Dot gain the growth of halftone dots between the film or file and the printed result, which darkens tones: InkSeps, a maker of simulated-process separation software, defines it as halftone dots enlarging after they are printed on the shirt or other substrate: in screen printing the ink goes through the screen's dots and then expands. Because simulated-process colour is built from separations made of numeric grey densities, the growth shifts the colours; its example of 50% black and 50% orange meant to give a brown prints as a much darker brown. The UltraSeps user guide makes the same point from the RIP side: its custom colour settings file must be loaded, or the channels render wrongly and adjustments cannot be made accurately because dot gain is not compensated for. Neither page gives a gain figure for a press, so the amount for a given ink, mesh and press has to come from your printer. A halftone that looks right on screen can print darker than the file.
In practice: Screen printing: Colour mode and profile · Colour: Screen printing: RGB working files and separations.
DPI dots per inch: The number of ink dots a printhead lays down per inch of image, and the resolution figure on every spec sheet. Reaching a higher DPI costs either more passes or a higher firing frequency, so it trades directly against line speed. A 1200 dpi head is denser than a 600 dpi one, which is not the same thing as better or faster. The word does a second job that has nothing to do with the head, and it is the one a customer means: the resolution of the artwork at the size it will be printed. The POD platforms answer that question in three incompatible ways. Printful asks for print files "At least 150 DPI" as a floor but recommends 300 for DTFlex, and for fine lines or text on All-Over Synthetic, Printify recommends 300 DPI and drops to 120-150 DPI on its largest products, and Redbubble tells sellers that DPI and PPI do not affect the uploaded image and publishes pixel dimensions instead. Redbubble is the one that is technically right, because DPI in a raster file is metadata a platform can overwrite while it scales the art to its own print area. Quote a customer a DPI number without saying at what printed size, and you have told them nothing you can hold them to.
In practice: DTG printing: Resolution at print size · DTF: Resolution at print size · Sublimation: Resolution at print size · Wall decor: Poster and canvas print DPI: resolution at print size · Screen printing: Resolution at print size · Embroidery: Resolution at print size · UV printing: Resolution at print size · HTV and vinyl: Resolution at print size · Resolution and DPI: What “resolution” means before any number · Resolution and DPI: Printer output resolution is not a file rule · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Resolution at print size · Stickers: Resolution at print size · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Resolution at print size · All-over print: Resolution at print size.
DPP digital product passport: A digital product record (composition, chemistry, footprint, recycling) accessible e.g. via QR; realistically ~2028–2029 for textiles.
Droplet size the picolitre volume of ink one nozzle fires in a single shot: Droplet size is the volume of ink one nozzle ejects in a single firing, quoted in picolitres, and a head carries a native drop size before any greyscale mode is applied. Small drops buy fine features and smooth tonal gradations; large drops buy density, opacity and fluid volume per pass, which is what absorbent substrates and heavy laydown want. That trade is the point of greyscale heads, which vary the size of the drop fired or merge several drops so fine type and a solid fill can come off the same nozzle row in one job. Run the wrong drop mode and the solid comes off thin and grainy on blanks you have already loaded and printed, and the reprint costs you the garments as well as the press time.
DTF direct-to-film: Printing on PET film + powder adhesive + heat transfer. Works on almost any material without pretreat; 65.7% of decorators already offer it (State of the Decorated Apparel Industry, via ASI).
DTG direct-to-garment: Inkjet printing directly on garments (water-based pigment + white), usually with pretreatment. Keypoint Intelligence expects industrial machines to carry more than 80% of DTG volume by 2027.
Dust jacket the removable paper cover wrapped around a hardcover book, with flaps that fold inside the boards: Mixam describes a lightweight, removable paper cover with a front, back, spine and two folded flaps, and prints jackets for hardcovers only. PrintNinja says it is printed on one sheet, built as a single spread slightly larger than the book: 0.27 in added to the page height, 0.3 in to the page width, 0.04 in to the spine for the jacket paper, flaps of at least 2.83 in (71.9 mm) and 0.125 in of bleed. Mixam works in millimetres: 7 mm added to the front and back widths, 6 mm to the heights, flaps of 60 mm for books under 200 mm wide and 80 mm for wider ones, and 3 mm of bleed. The flap minimum is shorter at Mixam for a narrow book than at PrintNinja, so the template of the printer you use decides. Both are book printers, not print-on-demand marketplaces, and the Prep books guide found no jacket file specification on the platform pages it read. The jacket's spine comes from the spine width of the book plus a paper allowance, so a change in page count or paper changes the file.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Spine width and spine text: KDP and other book printers · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Hardcover: case laminate, hinge and wrap.
Duty cycle the maximum monthly load a machine is rated to survive, not the load to plan production around: Duty cycle is a maximum rating for how hard a device may be worked, quoted in the printer trade as a rated throughput of pages per month and borrowed from the engineering term for the fraction of a period a system is active. It is a ceiling the machine is tested to survive, not a volume it will hold month after month, and that is the line shops cross. Where a vendor publishes a recommended monthly volume as well, treat that as the planning number and the duty cycle as the limit; where only a duty cycle is published, assume your sustainable volume sits somewhere below it. Size a press off the ceiling figure and you carry the difference yourself, as a head or a fuser gone mid-shift on the run you promised for Friday.
Dwell time how long a piece is actually held at heat, not how hot the plate is set: How long a piece is actually held at heat, counted separately from the number on the temperature controller. Time and temperature are separate conditions, which is why AATCC TM133, the colorfastness test for hot pressing, specifies temperature, time and weight rather than temperature alone: a platen at the right temperature still has to drive that heat through the fabric and into the ink film. Thickness, moisture and a cold shop all slow that climb, so the same settings do not behave the same on a heavy hoodie as on a light tee, and the only honest check is a probe on the ink rather than the dial. Cut dwell short and the ink sets at the surface only, then fails in the wash weeks later and comes back as a complaint and a reprint on a batch you already invoiced.
Dye migration heat reactivating a garment's own dye so it bleeds into the print: Heat from curing or pressing reactivates the polyester dye in the garment, which then bleeds up into the ink on top, most visibly turning a white print pink. It is also called sublimation bleed, and it belongs to the blank as much as to the ink: polyester and poly blends do it, cotton does not. It can appear hours or days after the piece leaves the line, which is how it gets past in-line QC and into a customer's hands.

Terms beginning with E

Eco-modulation extended producer responsibility fees scaled by how recyclable the product is: Under an extended producer responsibility scheme a producer pays a fee per unit placed on a national market, and eco-modulation moves that fee up or down against design criteria. France runs the most concrete version in textiles: Refashion’s 2026 eco-modulations are bonuses for product durability, environmental certification and recycled raw material content plus a penalty for components that make recycling hazardous, and a product carrying a penalty cannot also take a bonus. Packaging is heading the same way: Article 6(8) of Regulation (EU) 2025/40 makes producer contributions modulated by recyclability performance grade 18 months after the relevant delegated and implementing acts enter into force. The effect on a print-on-demand operation is that blanks and cartons stop being pure cost lines and become fee lines whose size is set by a supplier’s design choices. The failure is rarely the fee itself. It is reaching the annual declaration with no record of which garments qualified for which bonus, so the whole volume goes in at the default rate.
Éco-organisme the approved French body that collects extended producer responsibility fees on behalf of producers: France does not let a producer settle its extended producer responsibility obligation with the state. Producers join an approved éco-organisme, Refashion for clothing, household linen and footwear, declare the volumes they placed on the French market, pay the eco-fee and receive a Unique Identification Number that serves as proof of compliance. The duty follows the sale rather than the address: Refashion’s scope page puts online sellers and marketplaces in scope “even if based abroad”, and since 1 January 2022 a marketplace must hold its third-party sellers’ UIN or declare their volumes on their behalf. That is the line a foreign print-on-demand seller trips over. Shipping shirts into France from Poland or the United States creates a French producer obligation, the marketplace will ask for the UIN before it stops declaring on your behalf, and Refashion cites Article L541-9-5 of the Environment Code for an administrative fine of up to €7,500 per product unit where the obligation is not met.
Eco-solvent ink a milder solvent ink for uncoated vinyl and banner media: Solvent-based wide-format ink with slower, less aggressive carriers than true solvent, so it prints on uncoated vinyl and banner stock without the extraction and curing setup hard solvent demands. It still outgasses, and a print needs time to finish doing that before lamination, or the laminate seals the solvent in. It is one of three wide-format chemistries a buyer chooses between, with latex and UV-curable, and media compatibility decides that choice more than sticker price does.
Edge lift a UV-DTF transfer letting go around its perimeter while the middle stays down: How UV-DTF transfers actually fail in the field: the centre of the graphic stays bonded and the perimeter releases, so a customer catches the lip with a thumb and peels a design off a tumbler that looked finished on the bench. The edge is where handling gets a grip and where every application error concentrates, which is why a transfer supplier's own troubleshooting list reads as a list of edge faults: surface not cleaned, dust or oils under the film, a greasy, waxed or silicone-coated substrate, air pushed out from one side instead of from the centre, and a design too large for the curve it was put on. Dishwashers finish the job on drinkware, which is why the same supplier tells buyers to hand wash. None of it shows at QC, because at QC the transfer is minutes old and nothing has caught it yet. On customer-supplied drinkware the blank is not yours to write off, so the failure returns as a replacement item plus an argument about who paid for the mug.
Embroidery thread stitched onto a garment by a digitized machine head: Decoration by needle: thread sewn into the garment by a machine head running a digitized stitch file, rather than ink or a film transfer laid on top of it. Cost and machine time follow stitch count, not how big or complicated the logo looks on screen. The artwork has to be digitized first, a separate skilled step the machine cannot do for you.
EmpCo: The anti-greenwashing directive: from Sep 27, 2026, a ban on generic claims like “eco-friendly” without proof.
Empty space ratio the share of a shipping box that is air, capped by EU packaging law: Article 24 of Regulation (EU) 2025/40 sets the maximum empty space ratio in grouped, transport and e-commerce packaging at 50 %, and the duty falls on whoever fills the box, not on whoever made it. The date is the part that gets mangled. Paragraph 1 binds “by 1 January 2030 or 3 years from the entry into force of the implementing acts adopted pursuant to paragraph 2, whichever is the latest”, and paragraph 2 gives the Commission until 12 February 2028 to adopt the calculation methodology, so pinning the cap to the regulation’s general application date of 12 August 2026 is wrong twice over. Paragraph 3 defines the ratio against the volume of the sales packaging inside, and counts paper cuttings, air cushions, bubble wrap, foam and polystyrene chips as empty space, so padding a mug into an oversized carton does not improve the number. Paragraph 5 exempts sales packaging used directly as e-commerce packaging and reusable packaging in a re-use system, which is the escape hatch for anyone shipping in the product’s own box. Until the methodology exists there is nothing to measure against, which is exactly why the figure and the date travel through secondary summaries in mutated form.
Emulsion and screen exposure the light-sensitive coating on the mesh and the UV step that hardens it into a stencil: Emulsion is the photosensitive coating spread over the mesh, and exposure is the UV step that crosslinks it everywhere light lands, so the shielded image area washes out and leaves an open stencil. Underexposure is the failure that shows up most often, and the tell is physical: during washout the squeegee side feels slimy, or emulsion color lifts onto your finger. Overexposure has the opposite signature, a stencil that will not open up in washout no matter how long you spray it. Timing exposure in seconds is the quiet trap, since a lamp emits less usable UV as it ages, and the setting that worked last quarter is underexposing today until the stencil breaks down mid-run and stops the press.
EPR extended producer responsibility: Extended producer responsibility: fees for collecting and processing post-use textiles; EU schemes established by Apr 17, 2028.
EPS Encapsulated PostScript, the older vector exchange format with no transparency: An older PostScript-based format that can hold vector paths, raster images or both, still listed as an upload type by screen printers and UV RIP vendors. Its limit is transparency. ONYX states that EPS files have no support for transparency, so transparent regions are rasterised, and where a spot colour object such as a white or varnish layer crosses a transparency bounding box, the spot data inside that box is rasterised too and the specialty ink will not print there. The same guide recommends PDF 1.4 or higher to keep the transparency and the spot objects. On EPS, ONYX's RIP also needs its overprint option switched on before overprinted objects print as drawn. A drop shadow or a soft glow saved to EPS therefore looks right on screen and prints with a hard-edged hole in the white. If the shop accepts PDF, send PDF.
In practice: UV printing: File format · Screen printing: File format · HTV and vinyl: File format · DTF: File format · Resolution and DPI: PDF/X and vector files · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: PDF accepted, discouraged or refused.
ERP enterprise resource planning: The company-wide system for finance, inventory, and procurement, one layer above the shop-floor stack of OMS, WMS, WCS, and MES. A RIP vendor selling a REST API for “ERP integrations” means order and stock data flowing between the print floor and the books, not floor control itself.
ESPR: The EU Ecodesign Regulation (2024/1781): the framework for product requirements and the DPP.
EUDR EU Deforestation Regulation: EU due-diligence rules for products linked to deforestation: cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy, wood, and goods derived from them. Under the December 2025 revision, medium and large operators must comply from Dec 30, 2026, micro and small undertakings from Jun 30, 2027, and printed books and newspapers were removed from scope.
Expanded Distribution (KDP) the free KDP option that puts a paperback into bookstore and library wholesale channels: Expanded Distribution makes a KDP paperback available to the distributors that bookstores, libraries and academic buyers order from, in the United States and the United Kingdom (KDP Expanded Distribution). Enrolling is free and it is a checkbox on the pricing screen, but the royalty drops to 40% of list price minus printing cost, which on Amazon's own worked example turns the $4.00 a $15 book earns on Amazon into $1.00 (KDP paperback royalty). Hardcovers are not eligible, and the distributors also refuse journals, notebooks, planners, coloring books, public domain content and a long published list of saturated subjects. Nothing about it is quick: Amazon says up to eight weeks after acceptance before booksellers and libraries can order, and up to eight weeks again for a price or content change to reach them. Enrolment guarantees nothing either, because distributors decide whether to list and booksellers decide whether to order, and Amazon will not tell you which ones did.

Terms beginning with F

Fibrillation garment fibers working up through a thin ink film and dulling the print: Fabric fibers work their way up through a thin ink film after the garment is washed or tumbled, breaking the surface of the print and dulling it. The ink has not come off and it has not cracked; the garment's own fibers are standing up through it, which is why the fade is even across the whole print rather than the spotty, uneven loss you get when an undercured print washes out. Fleece, heathers and open knits raise fibers most, and the fix sits on the print side: more ink on the shirt, an underbase under the color, or matting the fibers down before the deposit goes on. It reads to a customer as a print that died in one wash, and it comes back as a claim on garments that passed inspection looking perfect.
Final value fee eBay's cut of a completed sale, set by category: eBay charges nothing to list the first 250 items a month and takes its money when the item sells. The rate depends on the category, and eBay's seller fee page puts the range at 2.5% to 15.3%: most categories run 13.6% of the sale up to $7,500 and 2.35% on the portion above, plus a per-order fee of $0.30 on orders of $10.00 or less and $0.40 above that. Books, movies and music sit at the top of the range; heavy equipment sits near the bottom at 3%. The detail that catches sellers out is the base. The fee is calculated on the total amount of the sale, including shipping and sales tax, not on the item price, so shipping billed on top and free shipping folded into the price are not the same margin on the same order.
Firing frequency kHz, the number of drops a nozzle can fire per second: How many times a second a printhead nozzle can eject a drop, quoted in kilohertz. With resolution it sets the real speed ceiling of a head: dpi says how dense the dots are, firing frequency says how fast they can arrive, and a spec sheet quoting only dpi is showing half the story. Push a head past its rated frequency and drop size and placement go first.
First-pass yield (FPY) the share of output that clears QC with no rework: The share of units that pass quality control with no rework, first time through. It is the output-side twin of rework rate: rework rate counts the cost of failure, first-pass yield counts the rate of success, and the two numbers diverge whenever rework itself is slow or expensive to run.
Flash cure the short shot of heat that sets one wet ink layer just enough to print the next one on top: A short burst of heat applied between print strokes that sets the top of a wet ink layer so the next color can go over it without pulling ink back into the screen. The target is a gelled skin: dry enough that the print does not lift on your finger, still soft enough that the layer above bonds into it instead of sitting on a hardened shell. Over-flashing is the common miss, and it shows up as colors that will not stick to the underbase, scorched fabric, or dye pulled out of a polyester blank; the setting also drifts through a run as the pallets themselves heat up. By the time the adhesion failure is visible on a finished shirt, the press has already run more of the job at that setting, and those pieces are scrap too.
Flatbed UV: A printer that lays ink straight onto a rigid object held on a vacuum bed, curing it with UV as the head passes. Where UV-DTF sticks a transfer onto an awkward shape, a flatbed prints the shape itself, as long as it is flat enough and fits under the heads.
Flatten merging layers and transparency into one opaque image before export: Merging every layer, blend mode and transparency effect into a single image, so that what the printer receives is what the screen showed. Wall and PDF routes ask for it by name: SAIC wants files flattened with no alpha channels, and Gelato recommends flattening all layers and all transparencies in a print-ready PDF. Printful warns that a PDF can carry hidden layers, blend modes and transparency effects that render differently during production, and asks for it flattened if a PDF is sent at all. Apparel is the exception. Flatten a DTG or DTF file onto a background and the alpha channel the RIP reads for white is gone, so the background prints as a box round the design.
In practice: DTF: Transparency and alpha · Wall decor: Transparency and alpha · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Transparency and alpha · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Transparency and flattening: book printers · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Flatten, or keep the transparency.
FOGRA39 the coated-offset CMYK characterization some transfer shops ask files to be converted with: A CMYK characterization data set for offset printing on coated paper to ISO 12647-2, produced by Fogra and listed in the ICC characterization data registry; the ICC profiles built on it are what a designer picks when a shop says convert to FOGRA39. It describes an offset press and a coated paper, not a garment, an inkjet head or a sheet of PET film. Some DTF suppliers still ask for it, Transfer Superstars among them, on the reasoning that converting yourself means you control how bright RGB colours land in ink. Other shops in the same trade ask for sRGB and run the conversion themselves, Printify's DTF file guide among them, so a file built to one instruction and sent to the other is converted twice. The loss is gamut: electric blues and neon greens are clipped at the first conversion, and no setting at the RIP brings back a colour the file no longer holds.
In practice: DTF: Colour mode and profile · Colour: Upload RGB, or convert to CMYK first.
Forced labor import prohibition Tariff Act Section 307 and the UFLPA rebuttable presumption: Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930, codified at 19 U.S.C. 1307, bars entry of goods made wholly or in part with forced labor, and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act turns that into a presumption: goods mined, produced or manufactured wholly or in part in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, or by an entity on the UFLPA Entity List, are presumed prohibited until the importer rebuts it (CBP). The burden falls on the importer of record, which in a POD chain is whoever brings the blanks in, not the brand that prints on them. Cotton is the exposed fibre because its chain is long and crosses borders at every step: field, gin, spinner, mill, cut-and-sew, and a shirt sewn in a third country is not cleared by that fact alone. Rebutting means documents traced back to the raw fibre, purchase orders, invoices, transport records and mill production records, and a supplier's assurance letter on its own does not carry it. A detained shipment waits until that file exists, which for a print-to-order shop means the blanks booked against next week's orders sit in a warehouse it cannot draw from.
FTC Green Guides the US guidance on environmental marketing claims, 16 CFR Part 260: Guidance rather than a rule you breach directly: 16 CFR § 260.1 says the guides confer no rights and do not bind the Commission or the public, but the FTC can act under Section 5 of the FTC Act where a claim is inconsistent with them, and they reach business-to-business transactions as well as consumer marketing. “Eco-friendly” is a general environmental benefit claim under § 260.4, which tells marketers not to make unqualified ones at all, on the reasoning that such claims convey far-reaching benefits nobody can substantiate; the fix is clear and prominent qualifying language limiting the claim to one specific benefit. “Non-toxic” has its own section, § 260.10, and the bar there is competent and reliable scientific evidence that the item is non-toxic for humans and for the environment, not for one of the two. The FTC’s own page still lists 2012 as the most recent revision, after 1992, 1996 and 1998, so nothing has moved despite a review opened in 2022. For a print shop the exposure sits in product copy nobody reviewed: “eco-friendly water-based ink” on a storefront reads as a general benefit claim about the whole shirt unless it is qualified down to what you can actually show.
FTE full-time equivalent: A standardized headcount unit equal to one worker's full-time hours, however the actual shifts are split across part-time or multiple staff. A labor saving quoted in FTEs is hours removed from a schedule, not a literal count of people let go, and the two figures can differ by a lot.

Terms beginning with G

Gallery wrap canvas stretched around the sides of the bars so the piece hangs without a frame: A stretching method where the printed canvas carries on over the edges of the stretcher bars and is fastened on the back, so the piece hangs frameless with no staples in view. What has to be settled at file preparation rather than at the bench is that everything wrapped around the sides leaves the front: the loss on each edge is the depth of the bar plus the fold onto the back, so the image is either composed with that margin or extended by mirroring or cloning before it goes to print. Trim to the visible size and the wrap has nothing to fold over. Compose without the margin and heads, signatures and logos end up on the side of the bar, and since the canvas is already printed and coated, the fix is a full reprint and a second stretch.
Gamut mapping the rule that decides what happens to colors the output cannot reach: Gamut mapping is the decision applied to every color in a file that the press, ink and substrate cannot produce, and the ICC handle for choosing that decision is the rendering intent. The ICC's own workflow guidance sorts them by purpose: the perceptual and saturation intents are meant for re-purposing content to a new medium, the colorimetric intents for proofing, with ICC-absolute colorimetric reserved for cases where the proof has to carry the look of the original medium. The ICC specification ICC.1:2022 does not fix the mapping itself. The colorimetric intents "preserve the colorimetry of in-gamut colours at the expense of out-of-gamut colours", and "the mapping of out-of-gamut colours is not specified but should be consistent with the intended use of the transform" (clause 6.1). For perceptual and saturation, "the exact colour rendering" is "vendor specific" (6.2.4, 6.2.5). Media-relative colorimetric also re-scales so the media white maps to the PCS white, which "introduces some change in all colours" when the two media whites differ (0.4). So what happens to an unreachable colour depends on the profile and the RIP that built it, not on the standard, and that is where a shop gets hurt: a navy gradient, a deep red logo or a shadow with detail in it can arrive flatter than the file, and the spec gives no rule to predict by how much. Nobody catches it on screen, because the screen has the gamut and the garment does not, and the honest fix is in the artwork rather than in the RIP.
Gang sheet many unrelated transfer designs nested onto one sheet of DTF film: A gang sheet is one sheet of DTF film carrying many unrelated designs, often pulled from several orders at once, printed in a single pass and cut apart afterwards. What nesting actually saves is film and press time, both of which you pay for by the length of sheet whether it is full or not; ink and adhesive powder go onto the designs themselves, so packing more work on does not reduce those. Nesting goes wrong in two directions: gaps you paid for and threw away, and designs packed so tight there is no room for the blade or for a clean carrier edge at the press. A nozzle dropout streaks the full length of the sheet and a powder miss takes out whatever block it lands on, so one fault runs through several unrelated orders at once and every one of them reprints late.
In practice: DTF: Gang sheets: width, spacing, scaling, mirroring.
Ghosting a blurred second copy of the image, offset from the first, left when paper or fabric moved while dye was still transferring: A soft duplicate of the image sitting a few millimetres off the original, and it is made at the end of the press cycle rather than during it. Press maker Geo Knight is blunt about the mechanism in its own note on the fault: when the press opens, the shirt contracts or the sheet floats to a new position while the paper is still giving off dye, so it prints again where it now lies. The fixes follow from that. Pre-press the blank to drive out moisture and pre-shrink it, run cooler and up to 30 seconds longer so the paper is spent by the time the press opens, hold the transfer with tack or heat tape, and, as Impressions puts it, lift the paper straight up in one motion instead of dragging it across a hot panel. Sawgrass adds a consumable: replace the blowout paper after each press, or the dye it picked up comes back as ghosting or ink transfer on the next one. This is not nozzle dropout and diagnosing it as one sends an operator to the printer for a fault the press is making: a dropout is a missing line that repeats in the same place on every print from that head, while ghosting is a whole second image that lands somewhere new each cycle. The blank, the paper and the press time are all spent by the time anyone sees it, and on a busy dark garment it can walk past the packing table.
In practice: Sublimation: Ghosting is a press fault.
Giclée: A fine art digital print, in the Fine Art Trade Guild's definition, often a reproduction and occasionally a computer-generated original. The word sets no process. Paper vendors narrow it: PermaJet says you must print on an aqueous pigmented inkjet with seven or more ink colours, while the Guild's own standard sets no ink count and asks instead for Blue Wool 6 or more, a substrate pH of 7-9 and at least 250 gsm. Those three numbers, not the word on the listing, decide whether the print survives a decade on a wall.
In practice: Wall decor: Archival paper.
Glass transition temperature Tg, the point where a polymer stops behaving like a rigid glass and its chains begin to move: The temperature at which the amorphous regions of a polymer loosen and its chains start moving, which is the condition sublimation depends on. Below it, polyester is closed and dye in the gas phase has nowhere to go; above it, the fibre opens and disperse dye lodges inside, held there by physical attraction rather than by a chemical bond. That is why a press setting is two conditions and not one: the platen has to carry the fibre past its glass transition and hold it there long enough for the dye to move in, which a cold shop, a damp blank or a heavy garment all work against. It is also what ties this to dye migration: take the same fibre back through a cure tunnel or under a second press and the garment's own disperse dye moves again, this time up into the ink lying on top of it. Cotton offers none of this. Cellulose does not soften at press temperature the way polyester does, so there is nothing to open and nothing to close again around the colour.
GMV gross merchandise value, what buyers spent rather than what the platform earned: The total value of goods sold through a marketplace in a period, counted before anybody's cut comes out. Etsy reports the same measure as GMS and says in its 2025 annual report that it "does not represent revenue earned by us": consolidated GMS of $11,916.9 million against revenue of $2,883.5 million, a take rate of 24.2%. The gap is fees, ads and services, and for a seller it is the share of the headline number that never arrives. Platforms lead with GMV because it is the largest figure available, and GMV can grow in a year when sellers earn less per order. On a shop's own books the same error looks like reading gross sales as income, before provider cost, marketplace fee, offsite advertising and refunds.
Goods-to-person: The automation brings goods to the operator instead of the other way around (Exotec Skypod, AutoStore).
GOTS / OEKO-TEX ECO PASSPORT: Certifications: GOTS for organic textiles (v8.0 from Mar 2027), ECO PASSPORT as the chemical-safety gate for inks.
Gradient a fade from one colour to another, or to nothing: A smooth change of colour across an area. On white-ink processes the question is what it fades into. Colour to colour is safe: Inkthreadable says gradients work if they are from colour to colour, because every pixel stays opaque. A fade into transparency is not, because the white underneath does not fade with it. On a dark shirt Printify says the underbase shows through and the gradient looks uneven or patchy, and it recommends a halftone gradient of small opaque dots instead; Printful's DTF guide rules out gradients from solid to transparent. Sublimation has no white layer, and Redbubble rates every kind of fade as OK on it while marking colour or white fading to nothing as tricky on DTG. The same file can therefore be right for a mug and wrong for a black hoodie.
In practice: DTG printing: Patchy gradient on a dark shirt · DTF: Ink limits and gradients · Sublimation: Ink limits, gradients and inks used · Screen printing: Ink limits and gradients · Embroidery: Colour count and gradients.
Gray scale the chip pairs used to grade how much color changed or transferred: The reference scale that turns a colorfastness result into a grade: chip pairs set at defined contrasts, held against the difference between a tested and an untested specimen. Two of them exist, they answer different questions, and they are not built the same: the color change scale (AATCC EP1, ISO 105-A02) pairs two greys, while the staining scale (AATCC EP2, ISO 105-A03) pairs a gray chip with a white one. The essential ISO scale runs five steps, an augmented version adds four half-steps for nine in total, and AATCC spells it gray where ISO spells it gray. Chips fade with light and handling, so a tired scale quietly shifts the pass line your customer's spec is written against, and a lot you graded as passing comes back as a rejected shipment.
Grayscale printing variable dot — one addressable spot printed with more than one drop size: In inkjet, grayscale has nothing to do with black and white. It describes a head that can place more than one drop volume on the same addressable spot, either by switching the drive waveform or by firing several sub-drops that merge before they land, so the printed dot comes in several sizes instead of one. A binary head has on and off, so tone comes only from how many dots the halftone puts in a given area; a grayscale head adds dot size to that, which buys smoother gradients at the same pass count and lets a single nozzle row carry fine type and a flooded solid in one job. The weak point is that the drop levels are only as even as the individual nozzles: sub-drop volume and velocity vary across a bar, which is why Xaar ties its per-nozzle waveform and voltage trimming directly to banding and color density variation. On the floor that reads as a gradient that steps instead of flowing, or a fill whose density changes where one head hands over to the next, and profiling will not rescue it because the profile was measured on a head state that has since drifted.
GRS Global Recycled Standard: Textile Exchange’s recycled content standard, at version 5.0 since July 2026 with a mandatory implementation date of 31 December 2026. Two thresholds get collapsed into one: section A3.1a of the standard itself applies GRS to products containing 20 % or more recycled content, while A3.2b allows product-specific GRS labelling only at 50 % or more. Beyond content it sets social and environmental criteria for the processing sites and restricts hazardous chemicals used in processing, which is what separates it from a plain chain-of-custody standard. Its scope has a hard edge that A3.2d states outright: it does not address the chemicals present in the reclaimed material, or what may be present in the final GRS product. So a GRS certificate on a blank is a statement about recycled input and about how the mill ran, not a clean bill of health for the shirt, and repeating it as one in your own product copy is the mistake that gets a listing pulled.
GSM grams per square metre, the weight of one square metre of paper or canvas: Grams per square metre: the mass of one square metre of the stock, and nothing beyond that. It is not thickness, not fibre, and not the coating that decides how ink sits on the surface. Epson publishes 395 gsm and 23 mil for its Exhibition Canvas Matte, two numbers in the same spec block, because weight and caliper move independently and a buyer who reads one has not read the other. The same split runs through transfer paper, where Beaver Paper offers one TexPrint grade at 92, 72 and 58 gsm: the number answers how much ink the sheet has to hold, not how good the sheet is. Shops still buy canvas on grammage alone, then find the heavy stock creases at the corner of a gallery wrap, or that a light paper cockles under a full ink load and takes a head strike with it. Ask for caliper, base fibre and coating; on its own, the figure has told you the shipping weight.
Gutter extra inside margin that keeps text clear of the bound edge: An additional margin on the bind side of interior pages. Lulu describes it as compensation for the part of the page the binding makes unusable, and says interiors under 60 pages do not normally need one while files with a higher page count should consider it. Lulu's table adds nothing below 60 pages, 0.125 in for 61 to 150, 0.5 in for 151 to 400, 0.625 in for 400 to 600 and 0.75 in above 600, and recommends interior margins from 0.5 in to 1.25 in. KDP sets the inside (gutter) margin by page count instead: 0.375 in for 24 to 150 pages, 0.5 in for 151 to 300, 0.625 in for 301 to 500, 0.75 in for 501 to 700 and 0.875 in for 701 to 828. The two tables give different values for the same page count, so the gutter belongs to the platform and the final page count, and a book moved between platforms needs it reset. A manuscript laid out with equal margins on all sides is the one whose text runs into the fold.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Margins and gutter.

Terms beginning with H

Halftone tone built from solid dots of varying size or spacing instead of partial opacity: A pattern of solid dots and open gaps that the eye reads as tone, used on DTG and DTF to make fades, shadows and textures without semi-transparent pixels. DTF Dallas describes it as larger or closer dots in the dark areas and smaller or wider-spaced dots in the light ones, and dot frequency is counted in lines per inch, LPI. ColDesi starts DTF at 40 LPI, with 25-35 for a vintage look, 45-55 for photos and 30-40 on the white layer; DTF Dallas puts the usual start at 45-65, so the number is a test point, not a rule. Platforms ask for it by name: Printify recommends a halftone gradient on coloured DTG garments in place of a transparent one. The usual mistake is halftoning text, logos and thin lines along with the background, which breaks edges that should have stayed solid. Skip it on DTF and a large solid fill presses as a stiff, plasticky block across the chest.
In practice: DTG printing: Large solid areas and blends · DTF: Large solid areas and halftones · Screen printing: Halftone LPI, angle and mesh · Resolution and DPI: Halftone frequency (LPI) against pixels · Colour: Halftones print where solid was expected.
Hand feel how a decorated area feels against the surrounding fabric: How the printed area feels against the rest of the garment: soft and moving with the fabric, or stiff, thick, and boardy. It is a complaint category of its own, separate from cracking, peeling, or a color miss, and a print can pass every other check and still come back. Too much ink laid down, an underbase heavier than it needs to be, or too much adhesive powder on a transfer are the usual causes.
Hazard Communication Standard hazcom, the OSHA rule behind every chemical label and safety data sheet in a US shop: 29 CFR 1910.1200 is what an employer owes an operator, and it is four concrete things: a written hazard communication program, a list of the hazardous chemicals actually present, a label on every container in the work area, and safety data sheets readily accessible during each work shift. Training is owed at initial assignment and again whenever a new chemical hazard enters the work area, not once a year as a slide deck. Shops treat all of it as filing, and it fails on the floor in the same three places every time: the SDS binder lives in the office, the decanted pretreat bottle carries a marker scrawl instead of a product identifier, and the temp who started Tuesday was never walked through either. Electronic access counts, as long as nothing stands between the operator and the sheet. Every one of those gaps is a document the employer was already supposed to have, which is why they are cheap for an inspector to find and expensive to explain.
Heat-seal patch a patch backed with hot-melt adhesive film, applied under a press instead of with a needle: A patch is decoration made away from the garment and applied afterwards, and what makes one heat-sealable is a film of hot-melt adhesive laminated to its back. Twill USA sells that film by the yard on a paper or mylar carrier and splits it by thickness: 1.5 mil is a temporary tack that holds an applique while it is embroidered, 5 mil is the permanent bond that makes a no-sew patch. Laser cutting is the other half of the category, because the beam melts the edge of a polyester twill as it cuts and the patch stops fraying without a merrowed border, which is why the same converting line runs laser cutters up to 54 inches wide. Stahls' offers emblems as heat applied or pressure sensitive, and that choice is really a question about laundry, worth asking before the order rather than after. The bond is only as good as the surface under it: a water-repellent shell or a heavy finish gives the adhesive nothing to key into, and the patch comes back off in the customer's machine.
Highlight white extra white laid only where the design itself is white: A white layer that goes down only where the artwork already calls for white, so white areas print brighter than the colours around them. CADlink defines it against the underbase: underbase adds white under the entire bounds of the job, highlight adds white only where white data already exists, and a separate highlight strength lets it carry a different ink volume from the base. Shops confuse the two and switch on highlight to rescue dull colour, which it cannot do, because it lands only on white pixels. What it does change is ink use and feel. Run at full strength across a big white panel, it pushes more white into an area the underbase already covers, and the print comes back heavier and stiffer than the approved sample.
In practice: DTG printing: White handling · Screen printing: White handling.
Holographic stock rainbow reflective sticker film that shows through wherever the file has no ink: Redbubble says its holographic stickers print on a rainbow reflective film without a white underlay, so any white part of a design is transparent and shows the holographic film. The same page advises using black and white deliberately, because black keeps outlines prominent but too much dark colour blocks the effect, and warns that some gradients do not translate while darker ones should be fine. Sticker Ninja likewise says all white or negative space in the artwork prints as pure holographic, while offering a white ink layer that its designers set up. CustomStickers.com says the vinyl has a reflective silver base, so light or pastel colours look more muted and very dark colours lessen the rainbow effect, and that it cannot guarantee exact colour matching. White in the file therefore means film, not white ink, unless the shop adds a white layer behind it. A design that relies on white areas needs rework before it goes on this stock.
In practice: Stickers: White ink on clear sticker paper: who builds the white layer on clear, holographic or metallic stock.
Hooping clamping the garment and backing into the frame the machine moves: Hooping is clamping the garment and its backing between the two rings of an embroidery frame so the machine can drive them together under the needle. The fabric should sit smooth and not move when a finger runs across it, but on ordinary knits it must not be stretched: stitches lock the cloth in whatever state it was held, and a knit hooped under tension relaxes into ripples the moment the frame comes off. Hooping too loose is the same fault from the other side, letting the garment shift so colors drift out of registration. Either way the piece is scrap, because embroidery on a knit does not survive being picked out, and hoop burn on pile or coated fabric fails inspection even when the stitching is clean.
In practice: Embroidery: Print area and hoop field.
Hot folder a watched folder carrying a saved set of job settings, so dropping a file in it submits the job: A hot folder is a folder the RIP watches; any file dropped into it is picked up and processed with a stored set of print settings, with nobody opening a dialog. The implementations differ only in what the folder is bound to: in ONYX each hot folder corresponds to a Quick Set and is monitored while RIP-Queue runs, while Fiery Hot Folders pairs each folder with its own profile of print settings and a job action. That is the whole primitive, and most print-on-demand automation is built on it: an order system writes the file to the right folder and the press behaves. What makes it dangerous is that the settings are invisible. Nobody can see which media, which profile or which ink limit a folder carries by looking at the folder, so one edit made for a rush job keeps applying itself to everything dropped in afterwards, and the evidence turns up hours later as a stack of garments printed against the wrong profile. Name folders for the exact state they encode, and treat editing one as a production change rather than a convenience.
Hot-peel film DTF transfer film peeled straight off the press, still hot: DTF transfer film built to come off the garment immediately after pressing, while it is still hot, where cold-peel film has to cool first. Peel a cold-peel film hot and it lifts ink with the backing; let a hot-peel film cool and the release turns unpredictable. Film behavior differs by supplier, so a film swap means a test press before the run, not a reject pile after it.
HS code Harmonized System code: The customs classification carried by a shipment, six digits agreed internationally and extended to eight or ten nationally, which sets the duty rate and the paperwork owed at the border. Knit versus woven, and which fiber holds chief weight in a blend, each move a garment to a different code and a different rate. Since the US de minimis exemption ended, a wrong code now bites on parcels that used to cross duty-free, as a hold at the border or a bill afterwards.
human authorship the US copyright requirement that decides how much of an AI-assisted design is yours: The Copyright Office's registration guidance for works containing AI-generated material states its view that copyright protects only material that is the product of human creativity, and that the word author excludes non-humans. For a shop the operative part is procedural rather than philosophical: applicants have a duty to disclose AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration and to describe the human author's contribution, and AI-generated content that is more than de minimis has to be explicitly excluded from the claim. An AI-assisted design is therefore registrable in the part a person authored and unregistrable in the part the model produced, which is a thinner right than a marketplace listing implies when it says the design is protected. The disclosure is not optional either, so a registration that hides the tool is a defective registration rather than a stronger one. This is the opposite pole from the New York mockup rule: one asks who made the picture, the other asks who is in it.

Terms beginning with I

ICC profile: A file that tells software what an image's colour numbers mean. It comes in two kinds that do different jobs. An output profile is the color characterization of a machine+ink+media combination, the basis of color repeatability across lines and plants. A working-space profile travels inside the image, like the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile Printful asks to find embedded in an upload. Only the second belongs in a file sent to a platform: Prodigi tells sellers not to embed its profiles, because they are for proofing only.
In practice: Sublimation: Colour mode and embedded profile · Wall decor: Colour mode and profile · Colour: Embedded profile: keep it, or strip it · Stickers: Colour mode and profile.
IEEPA International Emergency Economic Powers Act: The 1977 US statute that lets a president regulate international transactions under a declared national emergency, used from 2025 as the footing for a set of import tariffs. On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court decided Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and held that the Act does not authorise the President to impose tariffs (opinion, No. 24-1287). The duties imposed under it were terminated the same day. What did not come back was the de minimis exemption: CBP rebuilt the suspension on its own authority in interim final rules of 24 June 2026, so parcels that used to enter duty-free still do not (Federal Register). A shop that planned around the tariffs being struck down was planning around the wrong document, because the authority and the outcome were two separate questions and only one of them was decided.
Impressions per hour (imp/h) the rated hourly output of a press, one impression per printed piece: The throughput unit for garment and label presses: one impression is one piece through the machine, whatever number of passes the heads make to lay the ink down. It is a vendor ceiling measured on one product, one design, no changeovers, so the finished-piece count off the end of the line is always lower. Quote capacity straight off the spec sheet and you overbook the shift.
In-house vs network: The two POD models: own factories (Printful, Spread Group) vs a network of partner print shops tied together by API (Printify, Gelato).
Induction station the scan point where an item enters a sortation system: The point where an item is scanned and handed to a sorter, whether that sorter is a robot swarm, a cross-belt, or a chute line, and where the system learns what the item is and where it goes. Station count, not conveyor length or fleet size, is what caps throughput in robot sortation: the robots can only move what has been inducted. It is also where one bad label stops a piece and the queue behind it.
Ink channel one ink's own path through the press, from supply pack to nozzles: One ink's dedicated path through the press, from its supply pack through the line and damper to the nozzles assigned to it. The count fixes your color set, and on machines that can double a color up it moves throughput too: a press plumbed for CMYK plus white has every channel spoken for, so a spot color, a fluorescent or a second white has to come out of an ink already loaded. White is the channel that behaves differently, because its pigment is dense and settles out of suspension, which is why spec sheets that list an ink circulation function list it for the white channel. Converting a channel to another ink means a flush and a purge, which costs ink and stops the press, so it is not a decision you make between two orders.
Ink recirculation: Continuous circulation of ink in the printhead that prevents white-ink sedimentation and drying out (Kyocera “-RC”, StarFire RediJet).
IOSS Import One-Stop Shop: The EU scheme that lets a seller charge EU VAT at checkout and remit it through a single registration in one member state, instead of the parcel landing with VAT plus a courier handling fee for the buyer to settle before release. It covers distance sales of imported goods in consignments not exceeding EUR 150; above that ceiling the ordinary import route applies (European Commission). The same reform removed the old VAT exemption for imports below EUR 22 in 2021 and requires an import declaration for every parcel regardless of value, so no consignment is small enough to arrive untaxed. IOSS covers VAT and nothing else. Customs duty is a separate threshold on a separate timetable, and a shop treating an IOSS number as full clearance still meets a duty bill on anything that crosses it.
Irradiance the UV power landing on the surface right now, in watts per square centimetre: Irradiance is radiant power arriving at a surface per unit area, W/cm² or mW/cm², and it is a different measurement from the mJ/cm² figure most cure specs quote. RadTech's UV glossary defines energy density as the time integral of irradiance, which is why belt speed and lamp strength trade against each other to hit the same energy number, while peak irradiance, the maximum of the profile directly under the lamp, does not trade at all. The same glossary is blunt about two habits on the floor: dose is borrowed from electron beam work, where it means energy absorbed per unit mass, and a tubular lamp described in watts per inch is quoting electrical input divided by bulb length, which says nothing about the UV that reaches the work. Neither figure means anything without the wavelength band it was measured in, and neither means anything measured somewhere other than the surface being cured. A line that keeps hitting its energy target on a failing lamp cures a skin over soft ink, and that ships before anybody reads it.
Isothiazolinone the biocide class that stops a water-based ink growing biology in the bottle: Water-based pigment ink, pretreatment and their cleaning fluids are warm, wet and full of polymer, which makes them a place for bacteria and fungi to live, so they carry a preservative, and the class the trade reaches for is the isothiazolinones. Kornit's safety data sheet for NeoPigment Eco-Rapid White puts weights on it: methylisothiazolinone at 0.0015% to under 0.02%, the chloromethyl and methyl isothiazolinone reaction mass below 0.0015%, both classified Skin Sens. 1A with H317, with the finished ink itself labelled Acute Tox. 4 with H302 and Skin Sens. 1 with H317 under 29 CFR 1910.1200. Those fractions of a per cent are all it takes to stop the ink souring in storage, and they are also all it takes to sensitise a pair of hands that meets them daily. It is a trade a shop cannot buy its way out of, because an unpreserved water-based ink is a spoilage and nozzle problem rather than a safety win. The exposure is not at the print, it is at the bottle change, the maintenance flush and the wipe-down, which are the jobs people do bare-handed at the end of a shift.

Terms beginning with J

JPEG the lossy photo format, also written JPG, with no transparency: A lossy raster format with no alpha channel, so every pixel is solid. On a garment that is the whole problem: Printify says JPEG forces a solid background, usually white, which prints as a white box round the design on a dark shirt, and its DTF checklist reads "No JPEGs, ever". Transfer Superstars accepts JPG as the last resort and warns of a white background baked into the transfer. On wall art the same property does no harm, because the print covers the whole sheet, and Printful names JPEG for full-coverage photos, posters and canvas. Every re-save recompresses the image, so a JPEG passed between designer, seller and shop arrives with less detail than it left with.
In practice: DTG printing: White box printed around the whole design · DTF: Is JPG acceptable · Wall decor: Transparency and alpha · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: File format · All-over print: File format and size.

Terms beginning with K

Kiss cut a cut through the sticker but not through its backing liner: StickerApp defines it as cutting the sticker without cutting through the backing liner, so the sticker peels off a sheet that stays whole. The cut follows the cut line in the file. StickerApp states a maximum size of 27.5 cm (10.8 in) in one dimension for its kiss-cut stickers. A file with both cuts carries two cut-line layers, one for the inner kiss-cut and one for the outer die-cut (StickerApp file setup). Redbubble says all stickers on its marketplace are kiss-cut by third-party printers, and cut to the design plus approximately 1/8 in (3.2 mm) of white or transparent border so they peel from the sheet. The border and the liner are part of the product: artwork designed as if the sticker were cut free of its liner has no allowance for either.
In practice: Stickers: Die cut versus kiss cut.

Terms beginning with L

Laminate a protective layer added over a finished print: film applied cold or hot, or a liquid coating that dries or cures: A layer put over a finished print so that abrasion, cleaning and daylight hit it instead of the ink. Three families do the job: pressure-sensitive film that goes down cold under roller pressure, thermal film whose adhesive needs a heated roller, and liquid coating that is rolled or sprayed and then dried or cured. Drytac's Interlam Pro Gloss is the cold case, a PVC film carrying an aqueous acrylic adhesive on a siliconized release liner, while Marabu splits its own liquid coatings into UV-curable and water-based and sells the roll coater that lays them down. The word UV does three unrelated jobs in this aisle and shops read the wrong one: a UV-curable laminate is a coating that hardens under a lamp, a UV-blocking laminate is about daylight reaching the pigment, and UV-cured ink is the ink underneath, not a substitute for the layer on top. Quote a UV-printed job as protected and the customer gets a bare ink surface. Lay film over a solvent print still giving off vapour and the trapped solvent lifts the adhesive after install, which the outgassing entry covers and the reprint invoice does not.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Hardcover: case laminate, hinge and wrap.
Landed cost the full delivered cost: product, freight, duty, insurance, fees: What a unit actually costs once it is in the buyer's hands: the print and the blank plus freight, duty, brokerage, insurance, and handling. It moves with the route, the Incoterm, and the HS code, not only with the product, which is why two identical shirts can land at different costs. Since the US de minimis exemption ended, duty applies to cross-border parcels of any value, so pricing off the print-and-blank figure alone leaks margin on every order that crosses a border.
Last-mile delivery the final leg from the local depot to the customer's door: The final hop, from the delivery unit that serves a postcode to the actual address. Line-haul is cheap per parcel because thousands of them ride in one trailer; the last mile is one van, one stop, one address, with no density to spread the cost across. Cost follows density, so the leg that has none is the expensive one, and most of parcel economics is aimed squarely at it: lockers, pickup points, delivery windows, and consolidating two parcels into one stop. A POD order is the worst-shaped freight for all of that, a single item to a residential address with nothing to consolidate against, a residential surcharge, and a re-attempt if nobody is home. Shops meet it as the gap between the tidy zone-based rate they quoted at checkout and the invoice that arrives with accessorials on it.
Latex ink a water-based, resin-bonded wide-format ink cured with heat: A water-based wide-format ink that bonds pigment to the substrate with a heat-cured resin, rather than solvent evaporation or UV curing. It needs an inline heater and behaves differently across substrates than eco-solvent or UV-curable ink, so swapping technologies without checking substrate range and cure time changes both consumable cost and cycle time.
LEP liquid electrophotography: The print engine in every HP Indigo press: liquid ElectroInk developed onto an imaging plate one color at a time, then transferred to the substrate by a heated blanket, rather than fired through nozzles or fused from dry toner powder. Cost follows sheets and clicks rather than ink volume, and the consumables include a blanket that wears out. That is why an Indigo quote and an inkjet quote for the same book job do not compare line by line.
Letter of formal notice the opening step of an EU infringement procedure against a member state: When the Commission believes a member state has failed to apply EU law it sends a letter of formal notice, a written request for information that the state normally has two months to answer. If the reply does not satisfy, the next formal decision is a reasoned opinion, again with about two months, then referral to the Court of Justice; the Commission’s own description notes that most cases settle before reaching the court and that financial penalties are proposed when a country is referred a second time. The exception is the one that matters here: where a member state has not communicated the measures transposing a directive, the Commission can ask the court for penalties at the first referral. It matters to a compliance date because it is the first public signal that a national transposition is late or wrong. A shop can be perfectly aligned with the EU-level deadline and still be dealing with a member state whose register, éco-organisme or labelling rule does not exist yet. Tracking which states collect letters on a given directive forecasts when the national paperwork actually turns up better than the directive’s own deadline does.
Letterboxing padding a file with blank strips to force it into another aspect ratio: Padding an image with solid bands, usually black or white, so it fits an aspect ratio it was not composed for. Sellers do it to reuse one file across several poster sizes, and platforms do it on their side when a file misses the product: ArtStation tells artists to avoid letterboxing, while Redbubble centres and pads non-standard Art Prints with minimum borders of 1-2 inches to fit each paper size. Padding looks harmless on screen, where the bands melt into the page. On paper it reads as a mistake, a strip on two sides that the print was never composed for. Build each aspect ratio as its own file, because the customer who returns a poster with a stripe down one side is right, and the reprint is on the seller.
In practice: Wall decor: Aspect mismatch: four behaviours.
LEV local exhaust ventilation, extraction that captures contaminated air at the source: LEV catches dust, fume, mist or vapour where it is released and takes it out of the room: a hood placed close to the source, ducting, an air cleaner, a fan, and a discharge. A fan in the wall is not LEV. It dilutes, and it drags contaminated air past the operator's face on the way out, which is the opposite of capture. HSE treats an LEV system as something that has to be proved rather than owned, so the employer must keep its performance up and arrange a thorough examination and test at least every 14 months, with airflow indicators at the hood recommended because the usual failure is a slow loss of flow nobody can see. On a print floor that means the powder shaker's extraction, the screen wash booth and the dryer stack, and it means somebody reads the indicator at the start of a shift rather than after a complaint. A hood knocked out of position, or a duct half-packed with adhesive powder, still hums and still looks like it is working.
Lightfastness / print permanence rating how long a print holds its color on display, and under exactly what display conditions: A figure for how long a print keeps its color on display, produced by accelerated fading tests and meaningful only alongside the conditions it was measured under. ISO 18937 is a multipart series: general requirements in Part 1, xenon-arc exposure in Part 2, filtered to simulate indoor indirect daylight through window glass, and LED lamp exposure in Part 3, published in 2026, while most fading data on color prints from the past thirty years came instead from glass-filtered or UV-filtered cool white fluorescent lamps. Filtering, light level, sample surface temperature and humidity all move the number, and none of these regimes is a print hanging in a sunlit shop window. Quote a bare figure in years and the complaint arrives later, when the customer's print has visibly gone well inside it.
Line-scan camera a camera that builds an image one pixel row at a time: A camera that images one row of pixels at a time off material moving past it, assembling the picture line by line, where an area-scan camera grabs a whole frame at once. It only produces a usable image when it is synced to a known, steady line speed. Mismatch the camera to the motion and the image smears or tears, which is why putting one behind a dryer tunnel is an engineering project rather than a bolt-on.
Linearization calibrating a printer so the ink it lays down tracks the tone value you asked for: Linearization is the calibration pass that sets ink limits and builds per-channel correction curves so a requested tone value lands as that tone on the sheet, for one specific ink, substrate and set of press settings. It is not profiling. Linearization controls how much ink goes down and how the dots spread and merge on that substrate, while an ICC profile is only a lookup table of the colors that machine state can already reach, valid for the device state and the media it was measured on. Build a profile on a press nobody linearized and the drift is baked into the profile: plugged shadows, a gray axis off neutral, and a reprint the day the customer holds the new run against the one you shipped last month.
Lockout/tagout loto, locking a machine's energy off and proving it before anyone reaches inside: 29 CFR 1910.147 covers servicing and maintenance where unexpected start-up or the release of stored energy could injure someone, and it asks for written energy control procedures, trained authorised employees, and a periodic inspection at least annually carried out by someone other than the person who uses the procedure. On a press that means the air is off and bled, not just the motor. A conveyor dryer holds heat, a shaker holds a loaded hopper, and pulling a plug does nothing about either. The step shops skip is verification: paragraph (d)(6) requires the authorised employee to confirm isolation before work starts, which is a test, not a glance at a switch. Reaching into a jam with the lock still in somebody's pocket is how a two-minute clear becomes an amputation report.
Low-cure ink plastisol that reaches full cure at a lower temperature than standard plastisol, to keep polyester dye from moving: Plastisol formulated to reach full cure at a lower temperature than standard plastisol, so the garment does not have to be taken up to the heat that starts polyester dye moving. Low cure and low bleed are different tools that get used as synonyms: a low-bleed ink cures at normal temperature and holds the dye back chemically, while a low-cure ink works by keeping the blank cooler. Lower temperature does not mean less time, because cure is time and temperature together; the belt often has to run slower, and the full thickness of the film has to reach the figure on the datasheet, not just its surface. Swapping to low-cure ink and leaving the dryer where it was gives undercured prints that pass the packing table and fail in the customer's first wash.
LPI lines per inch, the halftone frequency a RIP writes to film: The number of halftone cells per inch, which CADlink defines as the halftone frequency. It trades against shades: at 300 DPI a 60 LPI cell is 5 × 5 pixels and holds 25 shades, while 20 LPI gives a 15 × 15 cell and 225. In screen printing the frequency has to match the mesh. Chromaline multiplies LPI by 4.5 for the lowest suitable mesh count, so 45 LPI wants about 202, and warns that mesh opens by 4-8% when it is tensioned. UltraSeps outputs simulated process at 55 LPI and 26 degrees on 280-305 mesh for the top colours, and suggests 45-50 LPI on 230 mesh for manual presses. On a print-on-demand upload LPI is rarely the seller's setting; the RIP applies it. It matters when a file arrives already halftoned: dots baked in at one frequency and re-screened at another produce moiré, the rippled pattern Chromaline traces to a mesh and line count that do not agree. Pick a frequency too fine for the mesh and the small highlight dots do not hold on the screen and wash out before the first print.
In practice: Screen printing: Halftone LPI, angle and mesh · DTF: Large solid areas and halftones · Resolution and DPI: Halftone frequency (LPI) against pixels.

Terms beginning with M

Mat opening the window cut in a mat board, smaller than the print it frames: The window cut in a mat board, which is the part of a framed print anyone actually sees. It is cut smaller than the print so the mat can hold the paper: Printify lists a 10.5 × 13.5 inch opening for an 11 × 14 inch print, and Level Frames overlaps each edge by 1/4 inch on customer artwork, or by 1/16 inch on photos it prints itself. That overlap is the part sellers forget. A design composed edge to edge for the print size loses a strip on every side behind the mat, and a border, a signature or a caption placed at the edge goes first. The fix belongs in the file, a margin at least as wide as the overlap, because once the print is under glass the only remedy is a new print or a new mat.
In practice: Wall decor: Framed prints.
Materials Matter Standard Textile Exchange’s single standard replacing its existing suite: Textile Exchange is folding its material standards into one voluntary standard covering the production and primary processing of raw materials. The first edition takes in the responsible animal fibre standards for wool, alpaca and mohair and the recycled materials now covered by GRS and RCS; the Content Claim Standard stays in place, carrying chain of custody and product claims. The dates on Textile Exchange’s own page are: criteria released on 12 December 2025, standard effective 31 December 2026, mandatory from 31 December 2027, at which point Tier 4 organisations must take their next audit against it to keep certification. Nothing is retired yet, which is why GRS 5.0 and RCS 3.0 were still reissued in July 2026 with mandatory dates of their own. For a shop the practical read is that the certificate names and logo rules on your blanks change inside two years, and supplier claim text will lag that change by longer. Record which standard and which version a supplier claim referred to on the day you copied it, because “certified” without a version will stop meaning anything specific.
Measurement condition (M0, M1, M2, M3) the illumination a spectrophotometer used, which has to be declared with the numbers it produced: ISO 13655 defines four illumination conditions for graphic-arts color measurement, and a measurement quoted without one of them is incomplete. M0 is the legacy source, close to CIE Illuminant A, with its relative ultraviolet content simply unspecified. M1 requires a match to CIE D50 across the full range including the UV, M2 is any source that excludes the UV component, and M3 adds polarization to suppress gloss. The choice only bites on substrates that fluoresce, which is most of them, and the ICC's guidance is specific: M1 is recommended when proofs and prints are to be assessed in a cabinet conforming to ISO 3664:2009, and M2 when the end-use viewing has little UV or is unknown. Mix conditions inside one workflow and the numbers stop being comparable: the profile was built on M2 data, the customer's spectrophotometer reports M1, and the same piece fails a tolerance nobody actually broke.
Mesh count the thread count of the screen mesh, which shapes how much ink gets through: Mesh count is the thread count of a screen printing mesh, quoted per inch on North American charts and per centimeter on metric spec sheets, and it sets both how much ink passes and how fine a detail the stencil can hold. Low counts have larger openings and lay down more ink, which is why they carry thick plastisol, glitter and underbases; high counts deposit less and hold halftones and small type. The error is treating mesh as an opacity control on its own, when stencil thickness, ink formulation, squeegee pressure, squeegee angle and off-contact all move the deposit alongside it. Pick wrong in either direction and you either flood fine detail shut or hand over a gray, under-covered white that comes straight back as a claim.
In practice: Screen printing: Halftone LPI, angle and mesh.
Metamerism two samples that match under one light and stop matching under another: Two colors are metameric when their spectra differ but their tristimulus values agree, which is the CIE definition: spectrally different color stimuli that have the same tristimulus values in a specified colorimetric system. Change the light and the agreement collapses, because the two surfaces were never returning the same shape of spectrum in the first place. This is the everyday reason a sample approved in the booth is rejected in a showroom, and it gets worse the further the reproduction is from the original colorant set: a Pantone ink matched with a process build, a sublimation print matched to a pigment print, a screen-printed solid matched to a DTG build. The instrument will not warn you, because a Delta E measured under one illuminant says nothing about how that pair behaves under a shop's LED panels or a customer's window. The fix is procedural rather than technical: put a second illuminant into the approval and look at target and sample under both before anyone signs, or accept that the reprint decision belongs to whoever is standing under the worse light.
Micron grade (adhesive powder) the particle-size band a DTF hot-melt adhesive powder is sold in: DTF adhesive powder is sold by the size band its grains fall in, quoted in microns, and that band sets how thick the melted adhesive layer ends up under the print. STS specifies its soft TPU powder at 60 to 140 µm with a melting point of 80 to 95 °C, and the grades either side of that trade the same pair of properties against each other: fine grains lay a thinner, softer film that holds small type and clean edges, coarse grains build a thicker layer that grips heavy or open-weave fabric and stiffens the hand while doing it. Shops buy powder on price and on whatever the shaker was last set up for, then run one grade against every job that crosses the floor. Too fine under a thick blank and the transfer looks perfect at the press and lifts in the first wash; too coarse under small type and the grains bridge the counters, the letters close up, and a gang sheet full of unrelated orders reprints together. Grade is not a free swap either, because a shaker calibrated for one band puts down a different weight of the next one.
Minimum list price (KDP) the price floor KDP sets so a royalty always covers the printing cost: KDP will not let a title be priced below what it costs to print, so it computes a floor by dividing the printing cost by the royalty rate, 50% or 60% depending on where the price lands (KDP paperback printing cost). Printing cost is a fixed amount plus a per-page rate, which on Amazon.com is $1.00 plus $0.012 a page for a regular-trim black-ink paperback over 110 pages, so the floor climbs with every page the manuscript gains. The rate is a step and not a slope: on Amazon.com the 60% band starts at $9.99 and anything at or below $9.98 earns 50% (KDP paperback royalty), so a floor computed at 60% that lands under the threshold falls into the 50% band instead and the real floor is higher than the arithmetic first suggested. This is the number that decides whether a page count is publishable at all, and it is the one authors meet last, after the layout is finished and the interior is set. A book that can only clear its floor above what its category sells for is telling you the page count is wrong, and the fix is back in the typesetting rather than on the pricing screen.
Mirror printing printing a transfer reversed so it reads the right way after pressing: Printing the image flipped left to right onto transfer paper, so it reads correctly once it is pressed face down onto the blank. Sublimation depends on it, and Wasatch states the rule for its RIP flatly: every image must be mirrored, and hot folders can do it automatically. The Send to Sawgrass Print Utility driver enables Mirror by default for most sublimation workflows. The exception is a substrate read from behind: for reverse-side glass such as a glass cutting board, Sawgrass says you may need to turn mirroring off, because the image is seen through the glass. Otherwise the only question is who flips it, and the answer has to be exactly one stage: Printful prints its mug transfers in reverse in production, which is why a seller uploading to a platform sends the file the right way round. Mirror it in the file as well and the RIP flips it back, so every mug in the batch carries backwards text and goes in the bin with its transfer paper.
In practice: Sublimation: Do you mirror sublimation images? · HTV and vinyl: HTV mirror image: mirroring and orientation · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Process rows: sublimation press, UV rotary and ceramic decal.
Mirror wrap canvas sides built by reflecting the outer strip of the image: A canvas edge option where the sides are filled by reflecting the outer strip of the front image, so the whole design stays on the face. The alternative is an image wrap, which Queensberry calls Natural and Printumo calls Stretched: the image itself folds round the bars and its outer band leaves the front. Printumo puts that loss at about 10% off each side on a 30×30 cm canvas and about 4% on a 100×100 cm one, and Queensberry calls natural wrap impractical for tightly cropped images. Mirror avoids the crop and brings its own trap: anything close to the template edge is reflected too, and Teelaunch warns that text there shows on the side of the canvas backwards. The canvas is printed, coated and stretched before anyone looks at the edge, so a reversed word on the side means a full reprint and a second stretch.
In practice: Wall decor: Canvas wrap.
MOQ minimum order quantity: The smallest quantity a supplier will produce or sell on one order, set per SKU, per color, or per size run depending on the supplier. POD exists to print below it, which holds only as long as everything comes out of a catalog someone else already stocks. Ask for a private-label neck tag, a custom trim, or a blank outside the network's range and the MOQ is back, with its lead time attached.
Mottling blotchy, uneven ink coverage in a solid area: Blotchy, uneven coverage across an area that should read as flat and solid, most visible in the white underbase on a dark DTG print. The cause usually sits upstream of the ink: pretreat sprayed unevenly or not fully dried, an inconsistent fabric surface, or a platen holding the shirt unevenly. It fails a garment on appearance before anyone gets as far as judging color.
MSA market surveillance authority: The national body that EU Regulation 2019/1020 puts in charge of checking products sold in the EU against the rules covering them, and to order non-compliant stock off the market. It is the enforcement end of CE marking, EPR, and the rest of the EU product rules: the regulation states the requirement, the MSA is who turns up. A shop shipping into the bloc answers to the authority in the country of import, not to the text of the regulation alone.

Terms beginning with N

Narrow web roll-fed label and flexible-packaging printing, on a width the trade has never agreed: Roll-fed printing and converting of labels and flexible packaging, distinct from both wide-format and garment printing. The width that separates it from wide web is quoted confidently and differently by everyone who quotes it: a flexo press maker puts the ceiling at under 20 inches (508 mm) and calls its own figure "an arbitrary designation", a trade glossary says under 400 mm, and another press maker says 16 inches or less. Treat any single number for it as that source's convention rather than a definition, and ask which one a spec sheet is using before comparing two presses on it. This entry previously said 330 mm (13 in): that is real trade vocabulary, but it names a once-common press width inside the category rather than the boundary of the category, and repeating it as the definition gave the term a precision the trade does not have. What the label holds steady is the shape of the work, and that is what matters to a decorator reading a vendor claim: inspection and colour systems built for this world, AVT and BST among them, watch a continuous web running at web speed on film or paper. None of it carries over to a garment line moving discrete pieces, however similar the inspection claim reads.
Native resolution the resolution the nozzle spacing actually delivers, before passes and drop placement inflate the number: Native resolution is what the nozzle plate gives you: the reciprocal of the effective nozzle spacing across the array, quoted as native dpi or as nozzles per inch per color. Anything above that figure is constructed rather than fired, out of extra passes, an interlaced carriage step, or finer drop placement along the scan axis. Spec sheets rarely say which of the two they are printing, and the word doing the hiding is usually an adjective: Epson lists a maximum print resolution of 5760 x 1440 optimized dpi, a density no nozzle plate on that machine is drilled at. The question that cuts through it is nozzles per inch per color, and the sheet is where it stops being answered: that Epson document quotes the resolution and never states a nozzle count anywhere. Quote a job at the headline and the arithmetic catches you at the press, because the machine only reaches that figure by adding passes, so either the throughput you costed disappears or you ship at the resolution the head really has, against a proof the customer already signed at the other one.
Nozzle compensation software that reroutes ink around a dropped-out nozzle in real time: Firmware or RIP software that detects a clogged or dead nozzle and redistributes its ink output to the neighboring nozzles, hiding the resulting gap while the job keeps running. It masks a dropout in the output; it does not clean the nozzle, so the clog underneath still needs a purge cycle or a head service.
Nozzle dropout: A clogged printhead nozzle → a light streak in the print. The main enemy of DTG quality; the hardware answer: ink recirculation at the nozzle.
Nozzle pitch the spacing between nozzles across a head, which fixes its native resolution: Nozzle pitch is the centre-to-centre spacing between nozzles across the width of a printhead, and it is what sets the head's native resolution, published as native dpi or as nozzles per inch. The catch is that few heads put every nozzle in one row: rows are staggered or overlapped, so native dpi is the reciprocal of the effective spacing once all rows are projected onto a single line, not of the gap between two nozzles sitting side by side. Some heads also publish a lower figure for a redundant mode, where the array covers each addressed position more than once so a blocked nozzle does not leave a white line, and on a scanning machine anything finer than the array comes from interlacing extra passes rather than from the head. Quote a job at a resolution the array never had and the soft type shows up on a proof the customer already signed, which makes it your reprint.

Terms beginning with O

Occupational dermatitis work-caused inflammation of the skin, in a print room almost always on the hands: HSE puts it plainly: the majority of work-related skin diseases are dermatitis, and when it shows up on the hands, contact dermatitis should always be the first suspicion. Two mechanisms produce it. Irritant contact dermatitis is cumulative damage, and the print-room culprit is usually not the ink but the cleanup, because solvent wipes, screen wash and repeated hand-washing strip the skin's lipids faster than they regenerate. Allergic contact dermatitis is the other route, and it does not reverse, which is why the isothiazolinone preservatives in water-based inks and pretreats are worth taking seriously before anyone reacts. HSE is equally blunt about the shortcut most shops reach for first: there are no true barrier creams. An operator with cracked hands cannot hoop, pull a squeegee or handle a white tee, and switching ink afterwards does not undo a sensitisation.
OCS Organic Content Standard: Textile Exchange’s standard for tracing organically grown fibre from a certified farm through to the finished product, and nothing beyond that. Section B1.4 of OCS 3.0 applies it to products containing at least 5 % organically grown material, calculated across the whole product excluding accessories and trims, and the standard’s sections run to input verification, claims and chain of custody. There is no processing chemistry and no social criteria in it, which is the gap GOTS fills: GOTS covers chemical inputs, wastewater and human rights criteria across the whole processing chain and requires every company in that chain to be certified. A blank sold as “organic cotton, OCS certified” therefore says the cotton was grown organically and the paperwork followed it to the seller. It says nothing about the dyehouse that coloured it, which is where a direct-to-garment shop’s pretreatment and wash-fastness surprises usually originate.
OEE overall equipment effectiveness: Availability × performance × quality: the standard measure of machine utilization.
OEKO-TEX MADE IN GREEN a traceable product label stacked on top of other OEKO-TEX certificates: A product label rather than a facility certificate, and it cannot stand on its own. OEKO-TEX’s stated requirements are that the product is already certified to STANDARD 100, ORGANIC COTTON or LEATHER STANDARD, that all making-up facilities hold STeP certification, and that any single component at or above 5 % of the product’s total weight comes from a STeP certified wet or chemical production facility. On top of that the making-up facility plus at least three components must be defined and confirmed in the supply chain, with the participating companies registered on OEKO-TEX Connect. Every labelled article carries a unique product ID or QR code resolving to the production facilities, production stages and countries involved, which is the thing the label actually sells. Shops treat MADE IN GREEN and STANDARD 100 as interchangeable and have it backwards: STANDARD 100 is the prerequisite, and a blank can hold it while being nowhere near MADE IN GREEN.
OEKO-TEX STeP Sustainable Textile and Leather Production, a facility certification: STeP certifies a production facility, not a product. OEKO-TEX analyses a site through six modules, chemical management, environmental performance, environmental management, social responsibility, quality management and health and safety, by way of a self-assessment questionnaire, an auditor’s on-site verification and corrective actions, then issues a certificate that runs for three years. It covers every facility type across textile and leather production, from fibre manufacturing and spinning or tanning through finishing and making-up. The confusion runs the opposite way to most certification confusion: buyers see STeP on a supplier page and read it as a claim about the goods, when it says the site was audited and says nothing about what came off the line that day. STeP is also the gate to the product label, since MADE IN GREEN requires the making-up facilities to be STeP certified, so a supplier holding STeP and no product certificate is at the start of that path rather than the end of it.
Offsite Ads fee Etsy's cut when a buyer arrives through an ad Etsy paid for: Etsy advertises listings on search engines, social platforms and its publishing partners at no upfront cost, then bills a percentage when one of those clicks turns into a sale. Etsy's own help page sets it at 15% for shops that have never made $10,000 in any rolling 365 day period and a discounted 12% for shops that have, capped at $100 per order. The threshold is the part sellers miss. Cross $10,000 once and participation becomes mandatory for the lifetime of the shop, with no opt-out and no budget setting; stay below it and the program is optional at the higher rate. For a POD shop the fee lands on top of the transaction fee, the payment fee and the print provider's cost, so a listing priced on a thin margin can sell at a loss on exactly the orders the advertising brought in.
OMS / WMS / WCS / MES: The factory software layers: order management (OMS), warehouse management (WMS), warehouse equipment control (WCS), production execution (MES).
OPC-UA Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture: A vendor-neutral protocol that lets machines and factory software exchange data and commands without a custom integration written for every pair. A press or finishing line listed as OPC-UA capable can usually be wired into an existing MES or monitoring system; one that is not needs a bespoke driver, or an operator retyping numbers into a screen. It is a data path, not a control philosophy: it says the machine can report, not that anyone is reading.
Optical brightening agent a fluorescent additive in media that makes the white read whiter than white: A fluorescent additive in the substrate that absorbs ultraviolet and re-emits it as visible blue light at roughly 400 to 450 nm, so the sheet returns more visible light than the visible light falling on it and reads as whiter than white. The effect only fires when the light source carries UV, which is why the same stock shifts appearance between a viewing booth, a window and a shop's overhead lamps, and why two spectrophotometers can report different values for one sheet. ISO 13655 answers that with the M conditions, M1 being defined to cut the instrument-to-instrument variation that fluorescence causes, and ISO 3664 was tightened in 2009 to control the UV content of viewing light. Ignore all of it and the proof that matched under the booth gets rejected on the customer's desk, which is a rerun of a job that measured correct.
Order routing the rule that picks which factory prints an order, and what changes when it moves one: Printify's Order Routing moves an order, or part of one, to a different print provider when the item is out of stock, has been discontinued, the chosen provider is closed or at daily capacity, its production time has stretched, or the customer sits in another region. The seller sets the ceiling: a maximum additional cost per item, and whether only exact product matches count or similar ones do too. Design scaling is capped at 7%, so an order that would need the artwork shrunk further than that stays where it is. A routed item gets a new SKU, and Printify lists which features change the fulfilling provider and which of them keep the new provider undisclosed. Leave routing on and never sample the alternates and you have bought yourself color variance you cannot see coming. Set the cost ceiling too tight and orders wait on stock that is not returning.
Outgassing solvent still leaving the ink after the print looks and feels dry: Solvent inks sink into the film and keep giving off vapour for hours or days after the print leaves the machine, long after the surface is dry to the touch. Media guidance treats dry-to-touch as no evidence at all: hang prints vertically or wind them loosely, keep them off the floor in a controlled room, and hold them for the dwell the media maker states, which is longer for film that will be conformed into a vehicle recess than for flat work. If solvent can still be smelled, it is not finished. Laminate or trim over trapped solvent and it has nowhere to go, so bubbles, edge curl and adhesive failure surface on the customer's vehicle after install, and the reprint comes with a second fitting.
Output intent the printing condition a PDF was prepared for, recorded in the file: A declaration inside a PDF, not a conversion of its colours. Prepressure's PDF/X-4 page says such a file must carry an output intent describing the intended printing condition, either as an ICC profile, embedded or referenced, or as an output condition identifier such as FOGRA27. Gelato asks for PDF/X-4 with the output intent set to GRACoL 2006, and says X-4 supports both sRGB and CMYK objects. PDFengine stresses the label's limit: it tells the printer which press condition the file was prepared for but does not change a single colour value, so a file stamped with an output intent can still hold colour numbers that were never converted for that condition and be rejected for ink coverage. Setting the intent and converting the colours are separate steps in an export, and a platform that names an output intent is naming the first. Check the second yourself, against the profile the intent points to.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Colour mode and profile · Colour: RGB, ICC and output intent: wall decor · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: IngramSpark and KDP PDF requirements: flavour and embedded fonts, book printers.
Overprint an object printed over the colour under it instead of cutting a hole in it: A fill or stroke flag that tells the RIP to print an object on top of what is beneath it. Grimco defines it in its Epson V-Series best practices as two colours overlapping and blending to make a new colour, against knockout, where the top colour cuts through the design underneath and stays true. Its example is a yellow rectangle on a magenta one: with Overprint Fill the two blend to red, without it the yellow cuts through. For white and varnish spot channels the flag matters more than for colour. Grimco says a White or Varnish spot not set to Overprint Fill or Overprint Stroke cuts through the design under it, and that design does not show whatever the Y-direction. The spot has to be named "White" or "Varnish", and its opacity sets ink density, so 70% opacity gives 70% density. See varnish for the clear channel. A white layer that is not set to overprint prints a hole where the colour should be.
In practice: Colour: Spot colour knocks out the design underneath · Stickers: Sticker cut line: path form, colour, name and layer · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Spot colour knocks out the design underneath.

Terms beginning with P

Pantone / PMS Pantone Matching System, a numbered library of spot colours with ink formulas, used to name a colour a printer must match: Pantone's Formula Guide page describes 2,614 spot colours in the Pantone Graphics System, shown on both coated and uncoated stock, with ink formulations for spot colour reproduction; it counts 224 new Pantone Matching System (PMS) colours in the latest edition. A PMS number is therefore a request for a named spot colour, not an RGB or CMYK value. On custom apparel the match is usually a paid extra: Custom Ink says each Pantone match adds $20 and one match is free for every $400 spent, with Pantone colours entered through Edit Colors or the Upload panel (the page is undated). Name the PMS colour in the order instead of leaving it as a swatch inside the artwork.
In practice: Screen printing: Pantone and spot colours · Colour: Screen printing: Pantone and spot colours.
Paper bulk and caliper the measured thickness of a sheet, and the thickness a paper gives for its weight: Caliper is the thickness of a material measured under specified conditions, quoted in thousandths of an inch, called mils or points, or in millimetres (Etherington and Roberts, caliper). Bulk reads the same property from the other end: of two papers of equal weight per ream, the one that handles thicker is said to bulk the better, and in papermaking the word means the ratio of fibre volume to total sheet volume, air spaces included (bulk). PPI is only caliper converted into a book number, and the conversion is old and public, with a caliper of 8.0 thousandths measured over four sheets giving 1,000 pages per inch and 20.0 giving 400 (bulk equivalents). Shops get caught assuming grammage settles thickness, because two papers can weigh the same and bulk differently, and it is caliper the binder cuts to. On a hardcover that gap walks straight into the case, where boards, wrap and hinge are sized from a spine width calculated on the wrong figure and the cover does not fit the block it was made for.
PDF page boxes the rectangles inside a PDF page that define its media size, trim, bleed and artwork area: Prepressure lists up to five. The MediaBox is the page size and is always present; for print work it is usually larger than the trimmed page, to leave room for bleed and marks. The TrimBox is the intended size of the finished page, and imposition software uses it to place pages on a press sheet. The BleedBox is the region to which the content is clipped in production, usually 3 to 5 mm larger than the TrimBox, though many prepress systems let the operator set bleed and ignore it. The CropBox is what a viewer displays and prints, and Prepressure says the GWG industry association recommends not using it. The ArtBox is the least used, sometimes marking a safe zone. For PDF/X the same page says PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 files need MediaBox, TrimBox and BleedBox, and PDF/X-4 needs the MediaBox plus either a TrimBox or an ArtBox, not both; its X-4 page adds that a file printed with bleed must define a BleedBox larger than the TrimBox and smaller than the MediaBox. Both pages are one reference site's summary; the ISO text was not read. A viewer shows the CropBox, so what appears on screen is not necessarily the TrimBox.
In practice: PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Trim, bleed and marks in the PDF: book printers.
PDF/X-4 the print-exchange PDF that keeps live transparency and names its printing condition: A restricted kind of PDF made for handing print-ready files between companies: fonts embedded, an output intent that names the printing condition, and transparency allowed to stay live. In print-on-demand it is the PDF route, not the default upload. Gelato asks for PDF/X-4 with output intent GRACoL 2006, a format it says supports both sRGB and CMYK objects, and Cloudprinter's mug guide says to save the file in PDF/X-4. Elsewhere a PDF is a risk rather than a standard: Printful warns that PDFs can carry hidden layers, blend modes and transparency effects that render differently in production and asks for them flattened, and Redbubble says PDF files won't work correctly. A layout exported with a generic PDF preset looks the same on screen and leaves the colour conversion to whoever opens it next.
In practice: Sublimation: File format · Wall decor: File format and size limits · Resolution and DPI: PDF/X and vector files · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Colour mode and profile · Colour: RGB, ICC and output intent: wall decor · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: PDF/X-1a vs PDF/X-4: which flavour · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: PDF flavour: wall decor and mugs.
Peak surcharge the temporary per-parcel levy carriers add in the high-volume weeks, also sold as a demand surcharge: A charge stacked on the base rate for the weeks around Black Friday and Christmas, set per parcel and varying by service, by package characteristics, and by how far a shipper's weekly volume runs above an agreed baseline. Carriers announce the schedules ahead of the season on their own rate pages (FedEx keeps one), and those pages are built for browsers rather than for automated readers, so the numbers have to be read by a person and read again every year. POD carries this badly, because the surcharge peaks in the same weeks the order count does and the volume tiers are written to catch exactly that shape of shipper. The damage is set months earlier: a shop that priced flat-rate or free shipping in July pays the December rate out of the same margin. Quoting a Q4 shipping cost off a base rate card is quoting a number that will not exist in December.
Perfect binding: The glued spine on a paperback, EVA hot melt or PUR where the block has to lie flat and survive handling. The default for short runs and single copies, because it needs no sewn signatures and no minimum quantity.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Spine width and spine text: KDP and other book printers.
Permissible exposure limit pel, the airborne concentration a US employer can be cited for exceeding: A PEL is the enforceable number: 29 CFR 1910.1000 sets most of them as an eight-hour time-weighted average, some with a ceiling that may not be passed at any moment. A TLV is not the same animal. TLVs are published by ACGIH, a private body, and a UK workplace exposure limit or any other OEL is another list again; only the PEL has a federal penalty behind it. OSHA says in its own words that many of these limits are outdated and that plenty of substances have no PEL at all, which is why it publishes annotated tables showing the Cal/OSHA, NIOSH and ACGIH numbers beside its own. For a screen floor that means clearing the PEL on a press wash solvent is a floor, not a verdict on the room. Chasing the enforceable number and ignoring the stricter one is how a shop passes an inspection and still sends people home with headaches.
PET film polyethylene terephthalate carrier film: The clear plastic carrier sheet a DTF printer prints ink and adhesive powder onto; the design is not a garment print until that film is heat-pressed and peeled away. Film type sets the peel behavior, hot or cold, and how cleanly the ink releases, so changing film is a press-setting change. It is also one disposable sheet per print, which is where DTF's plastic-waste question comes from and DTG's does not.
PFAS per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances: Fluorinated chemicals used in textiles for water, oil, and stain repellency, and stable enough in the environment to have earned the name forever chemicals. In apparel they sit in the finish on the blank rather than in DTG or DTF ink, so a decorator's exposure arrives with the garment: softshells, jackets, anything sold as water-repellent. Restrictions come through EU REACH, US state laws, and the chemical gates in GOTS and OEKO-TEX, which makes the finish on a blank a question to put to the supplier in writing.
Photoinitiator the ingredient in UV ink that absorbs the lamp's light and starts the cure: The component of a UV ink or varnish that absorbs ultraviolet light and turns it into the free radicals or cations that crosslink the resin; without it the ink sits under the lamp as a liquid. It absorbs over a defined band of wavelengths, which is the detail that catches shops moving from mercury lamps to LED: an ink is matched to the lamp it was formulated for, not to UV in general, and the wrong pairing leaves it uncured under a lamp that looks like it is working. Photoinitiator is a small share of the formula by weight, and free-radical types are robbed of radicals by atmospheric oxygen at the exposed surface, which is why a print can be hard underneath and tacky on top. That soft skin is easy to walk past on a fast line, it offsets onto whatever gets stacked on it, and the job fails a rub test at the customer and comes back as a reprint the shop pays for.
Pick-to-light / put-to-light lamps at each location that say where to reach and how many: A lamp and a small digit display at every bin, cubby or carton position. Pick-to-light points at the location an item comes out of, which suits fast movers in a dense pick face; put-to-light points at the location it goes into, which is what drives a put wall or a store-replenishment rack. The operator presses the button to confirm, and that press is the only evidence the system has that anything happened. That is the whole trade: it is faster than reading a screen and hunting a shelf label, and on the pick side it takes away the barcode scan that would have caught the wrong item. The put side still starts with a scan, because nothing can name a cubby until the system knows what the operator is holding. Run lights with no verification scan anywhere downstream and pick accuracy is exactly as good as slotting, because a light confirms a location and never a SKU.
Pigment ink ink that binds color to the fiber surface with a resin: Ink that carries solid color particles bound to the fiber surface by a resin, rather than dyeing the fiber itself the way reactive dye does. It is the ink family behind DTG and most digital textile printing; because the resin sits on top of the fiber rather than inside it, cure temperature and dwell time, not the ink alone, decide whether the print survives a wash.
Pinning a deliberate part-cure that locks the ink dot before it can spread: A short, deliberately incomplete UV exposure given to ink just after it is jetted, gelling the drop before it can finish spreading. A UV drop keeps wetting out on the substrate until something stops it, so the size of the printed dot is decided by how long it stays liquid; a low-power pinning lamp closes that window and holds the dot near the size the RIP intended, which is what keeps fine detail sharp instead of gaining. The same step sets a white underbase so the colors jetted over it sit on top rather than sinking in, and it is not a cure: pinned ink still has to pass the main lamp, and treating a pinning pass as finished leaves soft ink under a surface that looks done. Pinning sources lose output as they age, so an under-pinned run gains dot quietly across a shift, and small type goes unreadable on work already boxed, which is a reprint of the whole run.
plasticised material the REACH restriction category a printed design on a garment sits inside: A phrase from Commission Regulation (EU) 2018/2005, which rewrote entry 51 of REACH Annex XVII. It reads as though it means the plastic parts of a product, so shops conclude a T-shirt has none. The regulation's own paragraph 5 lists what counts: PVC, PVDC, PVA and polyurethanes; any other polymer except silicone rubber and natural latex coatings; then "surface coatings, non-slip coatings, finishes, decals, printed designs"; then "adhesives, sealants, paints and inks". A plastisol screen print, a DTF film, a heat-transfer decal and the adhesive under it are each named in that list. Four phthalates may not be placed on the market in articles at or above 0,1 % by weight of the plasticised material, and since 7 July 2020 that applies to every article rather than to toys alone, so the threshold is a share of the print and not of the garment. The exemption for industrial, agricultural and open-air articles holds only where no plasticised material touches mucous membranes or has prolonged skin contact, and the same text defines prolonged as continuous contact over ten minutes or intermittent contact across thirty minutes in a day, which a printed tee clears before the wearer leaves the house.
Plastisol a PVC-based screen-printing ink cured with heat: PVC-based screen ink that sits on the fabric as a cured film rather than soaking in, and needs heat to cure rather than air-drying. It is what most people mean by screen printing on a production floor, as distinct from water-based or discharge inks that go into the fiber. It will not dry in the screen mid-run the way water-based ink can, and that same surface film is what gives a plastisol print its heavier hand feel.
Platen the flat board a garment is loaded onto so it stays flat and square through pretreat, print and cure: The flat board, usually aluminium or coated metal, that clamps to the arm of a DTG printer or a press and holds one garment stretched flat and square while it is pretreated, printed and cured. Screen printing calls the same part a pallet, and Kornit's own glossary treats the two words as one thing, with adult, youth, sleeve, pocket and specialty shapes in both trades, because a board wider than the garment lets fabric fold under the heads. It fixes two things the operator controls: where the print lands, and the gap between the fabric and the nozzle plate. A seam, a zip or a bunched collar riding proud of the board is what a head strike is made of, and pretreat overspray baked onto the surface comes off on the back of the next garment as a rectangle nobody ordered. Neither fault announces itself from the loading side; both read on the finished piece. A platen swap is changeover time, which is why most shops standardise on two sizes and charge setup for the third.
In practice: DTG printing: Print area.
PNG Portable Network Graphics, the lossless raster format that can carry transparency: A lossless raster format whose value in print-on-demand is the alpha channel: it can store a transparent background, which on DTG and DTF is the instruction for where no ink and no white go. Printful calls PNG usually the best option for DTG, and Printify's DTF checklist asks for PNG-24 with a 100% transparent background. The format allows transparency without guaranteeing it. A PNG exported on a white canvas is as solid as a JPEG, and soft edge pixels survive the export untouched, so the file has to be checked, not just named. Platforms cap the size, at 200 MB and 20,000 × 20,000 px at Printful and 100 MB at Printify, which a 300 DPI all-over panel can reach before it runs short of pixels.
In practice: DTG printing: File format · DTF: File format · Sublimation: File format · Wall decor: File format and size limits · Screen printing: File format · Embroidery: File format and digitising · UV printing: File format · HTV and vinyl: File format · Stickers: File format · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: File format · All-over print: File format and size.
POD print-on-demand: Producing a single piece once the order is paid. Zero finished-goods inventory, full personalization.
Powder shaker the in-line machine that dusts adhesive powder onto a printed DTF sheet and melts it on: The in-line unit between a DTF printer and the heat press, doing three jobs in one pass: it dusts hot-melt adhesive powder over the freshly printed sheet, shakes the excess back off, and carries the sheet through a heater that melts the powder into a transfer-ready layer. Powder bonds only to ink that is still wet. A sheet that skins over before it reaches the powder stage takes a thin, patchy coat across the design, and stray grains left sitting on the clear areas melt into a haze that presses onto the garment as a ghost outline. Neither fault shows while the design is still on film, so it turns up on a pressed garment or in a customer's laundry, and by then the run is scrap and the reprint is unpaid.
PPI (pages per inch) how many pages of a given paper stack into one inch of spine: PPI is what turns a page count into a physical object: spine width, board size, carton fit, shipping band. It is a property of the paper rather than of the book, and the spread is wide. The binder's bulk tables run from 1,454 pages per inch at a caliper of 5.5 thousandths down to 160 at 50.0 (Etherington and Roberts, bulk equivalents). Print-on-demand platforms bury the figure inside a spine formula instead of quoting it, so KDP multiplies page count by 0.0025 inch for cream paper and 0.002252 inch for white, allows 0.0625 inch of variance either side of the fold lines and calls a spine shifted more than 0.0125 inch defective (KDP cover specification). Those two multipliers are 400 and roughly 444 pages to the inch, and a cover built on the wrong one puts the spine artwork on the front. On a print-on-demand title that is not one bad run to reprint, it is every copy sold since the file went live. The same three letters on an image spec mean pixels per inch, which has its own entry.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Spine width and spine text: KDP and other book printers.
PPI (pixels per inch) how many image pixels fall on each inch of the printed size: The resolution of an image at a given print size: pixel width divided by print width in inches. It is what most upload specs mean when they write DPI. ArtStation spells out the sum, 300 ppi times 10 inches is 3000 px, so a 10 × 8 inch print needs 3000 × 2400 px, and warns not to confuse PPI with DPI, the ink droplets its printers lay down at up to 2400 × 1200 dpi. Sawgrass recommends working at 300 Pixels/Inch for sublimation. The figure stored in the file is only a tag: Redbubble says DPI and PPI don't affect the uploaded image and publishes pixel minimums instead. Divide the pixels by the inches before trusting the tag, because a resize without resampling changes the PPI and not the detail. In book production the same letters mean pages per inch.
In practice: Sublimation: Resolution at print size · Wall decor: Poster size in pixels: print area and pixel size · Resolution and DPI: Pixel sizes instead of DPI · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Resolution at print size · Stickers: Resolution at print size.
PPWR EU packaging and packaging waste regulation: Regulation (EU) 2025/40, adopted on 19 December 2024, replaced Directive 94/62/EC and turned EU packaging law from a directive each member state transposed its own way into a regulation that applies directly. Article 70 repeals the old directive with effect from 12 August 2026, which is the same day the regulation itself starts to apply. Almost nothing operational bites then: recyclability grades, minimum recycled content in plastic and the empty space cap all hang off delegated or implementing acts the Commission has not adopted yet, so their deadlines read “1 January 2030 or N years from the entry into force of those acts, whichever is the latest”. Shops that plan against a client alert instead of the regulation pick 2026 as the wall and then find the real work is producer registration in every member state they ship to, packaging data, and box sizes. A print-on-demand operation ships one order in one carton, so PPWR reaches it as transport packaging: how much air is in the box, and who is on the register as producer for it.
Pretreatment: Chemical preparation of the fabric for white/pigment in DTG. “Wet-on-wet” = printing without drying the pretreat (inline, per piece).
Print area the part of a product the platform will print, and the size the file is built to: The part of a product a platform will put ink on, set by its template rather than by the machine. A file is sized to it: Printful's front area for select DTG products is 15″ × 18″, which replaced the legacy 12″ × 16″, and Printify's blog builds that canvas at 4500 × 5400 px at 300 DPI. Inside it sit two lines that matter more than its edge: the safe area for text and faces and, on cut products, the bleed. Outside it nothing counts: Printful treats a design placed outside the print area as a blank product. A file built to a different shape is cropped, padded or refused, which the sizing mode entry works through.
In practice: DTG printing: Print area · DTF: Print area and canvas size · Sublimation: Print area and canvas size · Wall decor: Poster size in pixels: print area and pixel size · Screen printing: Print area and canvas size · Embroidery: Print area and hoop field · UV printing: Print area and canvas size · HTV and vinyl: Cutting area and print area · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Print area and trim size · Stickers: Print area and sticker size · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Mug and tumbler template size: print area and canvas by platform · All-over print: Print area and canvas size.
Print embellishment any finishing effect layered onto a print beyond flat CMYK: Any finishing effect added on top of a flat CMYK print: foil, spot gloss or varnish, raised texture, glitter or metallic effect, usually simulated on screen before the job runs. Rendering it digitally saves a proof run on the actual finishing line, but the simulation is only as good as the profile behind it, and an unmatched profile still means a wasted press check.
Print provider the factory a POD network routes an order to: The shop that actually prints and ships the order in a network model, and the reason two identical-looking listings behave differently. Printify's catalog spells out what separates one provider from another: location, product pricing, shipping rates and methods, available colors and sizes, print area dimensions, packaging extras, and the printing equipment itself. Even on the same blank with the same technology, each provider has tuned its own color output, so a design signed off on one is not signed off on all of them. Printify ranks every provider 0 to 10 with a Performance Score rebuilt weekly from quality complaints, on-time shipping and sample feedback. Sellers choose on price and ship-from country, order one sample, and never sample the second provider they later switch to. That is the shop that learns about a color shift from a buyer photo.
Printhead the inkjet engine that fires ink through nozzles onto the substrate: The array of nozzles that fires ink droplets onto the substrate under the RIP's instructions, the actual print engine of a digital press. Head model sets resolution, drop size, ink compatibility, and cost to replace, so the throughput and defect stories in this glossary trace back to which head a machine runs: Fujifilm Dimatix StarFire, Ricoh MH5420/5440, Kyocera KJ4B.
In practice: Resolution and DPI: Printer output resolution is not a file rule.
Proposition 65 california's warning law for chemicals the state lists as causing cancer or reproductive harm: Proposition 65 bans nothing. Section 25249.6 of the Health and Safety Code says a business may not knowingly and intentionally expose anyone in California to a listed chemical without a clear and reasonable warning first, and section 25249.8 sets the three ways a chemical gets listed: the state's qualified experts, a body those experts consider authoritative, or any state or federal agency that has formally required it to be labelled as a carcinogen or reproductive toxicant. Enforcement is the part that reaches a POD seller, because private plaintiffs may sue in the public interest sixty days after serving notice and the penalty runs to $2,500 per day for each violation. The real cost is the lawyer, not the fine. So a seller shipping into California decides product by product whether to warn, to reformulate, or to show the exposure sits under a safe harbour level, and the decision has to be made before the first order ships, not after the notice arrives. Businesses with fewer than ten employees fall outside the definition of a person doing business, which is the one exemption small shops rarely check.
Puckering fabric drawing up into ripples around an embroidered design: Puckering is cloth pulling up into ripples around and inside a design, because every needle penetration draws the fabric toward the stitch line and the stitches then hold it there (Wilcom EmbroideryStudio help). On the machine you usually cannot see it. The hoop holds the garment flat and the backing is still full size, so a piece that will ripple later can still pass the operator's look. Some of it shows the moment the frame comes off, and the rest waits for the customer's first wash, when a cotton knit relaxes and shrinks around a design that cannot shrink with it. Every cause sits upstream of that wash: fabric hooped under tension, backing too light for the stitch density, missing underlay, no pull compensation. Nothing can be repaired, because picking stitches out of a knit leaves the holes behind, so the bill is a replacement garment for something the customer has already worn.
In practice: Embroidery: Puckered fabric and bunched stitches.
Pull compensation extra width digitized into a shape to cancel the pull of the stitches: Every needle penetration drags the cloth inward toward the stitch line, so a satin column sewn at its drawn width comes out narrower than drawn and gaps open where it should meet the shape beside it. Pull compensation is the width the digitizer adds back before the file ever reaches the machine, either by overlapping objects by hand or as an overstitch allowance in millimetres. The value belongs to the fabric, not to the artwork: Wilcom's guideline table asks 0.20 mm on drill and cotton, 0.35 mm on a T-shirt, 0.40 mm on fleece, and 0.2 to 0.3 mm for lettering (Wilcom EmbroideryStudio help). Hooping and column width move it further, which is why a file that ran clean on woven jackets shows garment color between the letters on the polo order. Overdoing it is a defect of its own: fat letters, filled-in counters, a logo that no longer matches the brand sheet, and nobody notices until the customer holds the shirt next to their guidelines.
In practice: Embroidery: Underlay, pull compensation and density.
PUR binding perfect binding with a polyurethane adhesive that cures by reacting with moisture: PUR binding is perfect binding with a polyurethane reactive hot melt, an isocyanate-terminated adhesive that sets as it cools and then keeps curing by reacting with moisture from the air and the paper. That second stage is what separates it from EVA hot melt: EVA is thermoplastic and only ever cools back to what it was, while PUR crosslinks into a thermoset that holds through heat, cold, and the coated and digitally printed stocks EVA struggles to grip. It also goes on in a much thinner film than EVA, which is why PUR books lie flat instead of fighting the reader. The catch is the clock, because a book is not at full strength coming off the binder, and trimming or boxing it before the cure has run gives you pages pulling out of a spine that looked perfect on the line.
Purge cycle a forced flush of ink through the printhead nozzles: A forced flush of ink through the printhead nozzles, run to clear a clog before it turns into a visible streak on the print. It is the active maintenance move an operator runs before or during a job, distinct from ink recirculation, which is passive and constant, and running purges too often just burns ink for no quality gain.
Put wall a shelf of cubbies where picked items get sorted into single orders: A rack of small compartments, each one assigned to a single open order for as long as that order takes to complete. A picker who has just batch-picked forty items covering thirty orders scans them one at a time, the system names a cubby, the item goes in, and on the far side a packer pulls the cubbies that have gone complete. It is what makes batch picking usable: without a wall, one pass through the aisles produces a tote of mixed items and no finished orders. Walls are sized by the number of orders open at once and by arm's reach, so an operator should not have to take more than two or three steps, and a shop that batches wider than its cubby count stalls mid-wave with nowhere to put the next item. The second failure is quieter: a mis-sort puts a correct item into the wrong order, which reaches the customer instead of stopping the line, so it never shows up in a throughput number.

Terms beginning with R

RaaS / Pay-Per-Pick / AIC: “Pay-per-use” models instead of CAPEX: robots on subscription (RaaS), a fee per pick (AutoStore), a fee per print with the machine and service included (Kornit AIC).
RCS Recycled Claim Standard: The Global Recycled Standard’s sibling from Textile Exchange, at version 3.0 since July 2026 and mandatory for audits from 31 December 2026. The threshold is where it parts company with GRS: section A3.1a of the standard applies it to products containing 5 % or more recycled content, against 20 % for GRS. What it leaves out is the part buyers assume is included, and the standard says so in plain words: the RCS does not address social or environmental aspects of processing and manufacturing, quality, or legal compliance. It verifies that recycled material went in, using the ISO 14021 definition of recycled content, and that the chain of custody holds to the last business-to-business seller. The pair get sold as one badge on blank listings, “RCS/GRS certified”, which flattens a traceability check and a processing standard into the same claim; ask which one, and at what percentage, before it lands in your own copy.
Reactive dye printing dye bonded chemically to the fiber, then steamed and washed off: Dye that forms a chemical bond with the fiber, mostly cotton, then has to be steamed to fix it and washed to strip the unfixed portion: a wet, energy-heavy finishing line standing behind every printed run. Pigment ink skips both steps, sitting on the fiber and curing with heat instead. Reactive is the baseline whenever a pigment vendor quotes water, energy, or CO2 savings, so ask which steps the comparison covers before believing the percentage.
reasonable basis the proof a US care label has to rest on before it is printed: 16 CFR 423.6 makes it an unfair or deceptive act to fail to possess, before sale, a reasonable basis for all regular care information given to the purchaser, and the same section says that basis must be reliable evidence the product was not harmed when cleaned according to the label. The clause decorators miss defines what an instruction is: the rule requires evidence for "instructions when silence has a meaning", and its own worked example is a shirt labelled machine wash, tumble dry, cool iron, where saying nothing about bleach asserts that bleach is safe. A decorated garment is a different product from the blank, so the blank maker's label is evidence about undecorated fabric and nothing else. Nobody has tested what the print does at that wash temperature unless the shop tested it. The honest routes are to test the decorated garment or to narrow the label, because the rule does not ask what the fabric survives; it asks what the thing you sold survives.
Referral fee the marketplace commission on the sale price, whoever printed the item: What Amazon and TikTok Shop call the cut they take for putting the listing in front of a buyer. Amazon sets it per category and charges a percentage of the total price or a minimum amount, whichever is greater: its pricing page puts Clothing and Accessories at 5% up to $15.00, 10% from there to $20.00 and 17% above it, with a $0.30 minimum, while Everything Else sits at 15%. A referral fee is not a POD royalty. The referral fee comes off a price you set on a product you already paid a fulfiller to make, so the marketplace percentage stacks on top of your unit cost; a royalty on Merch on Demand is the offer price less tax and less Amazon's costs, with a multiplier for the seller's royalty group, and the gross never passes through your account. One is a deduction from money that reached you. The other is the only line you ever see.
Registration how precisely print passes align on top of each other: How precisely each color or pass lines up on top of the others and on the garment or substrate itself. Misregistration shows up as blur, a halo, or a visible color fringe, and it is the alignment check every screen job and every multi-pass digital job lives or dies on.
In practice: HTV and vinyl: Bleed and registration marks.
Regulatory Operating Fee Etsy's country surcharge, set by where the seller sits: A percentage Etsy adds on top of its other selling fees, charged on the item price plus shipping and gift wrap, and set by the seller's country rather than the buyer's. Etsy's help page lists the rates: Hungary 1.97%, Türkiye 1.67%, Vietnam 1.24%, France 1.14%, Spain 0.88%, Italy 0.80%, Canada 0.50%, the United Kingdom 0.48% and India 0.05%. It is subject to VAT where VAT applies, so the deduction on the payment account runs slightly above the headline rate. Because it applies to shipping as well as the item, a shop that prices shipping high and the item low pays more of it than the same order priced the other way round. It is small per order and easy to leave out of a margin sheet, which is how a Hungarian or Turkish shop quietly lands a point under the number it planned for.
Rendering intent the rule a colour conversion uses for colours the destination cannot reproduce: The setting that decides how colours are handled when an image is converted between ICC profiles and the destination cannot reproduce all of them (see gamut). The ICC specification ICC.1:2022 defines four: ICC-absolute colorimetric, media-relative colorimetric, perceptual and saturation, and says the colorimetric intents "preserve the colorimetry of in-gamut colours at the expense of out-of-gamut colours" while "the mapping of out-of-gamut colours is not specified" (clause 6.1). It calls the perceptual intent "most applicable for the colour re-rendering of natural images" and says its rendering is vendor specific, typically with tone scale adjustment and gamut reshaping; the media-relative colorimetric intent is "appropriate when mapping of the source medium white to the destination medium white is desired, but a full colour re-rendering is not". The saturation intent usually "involves compromises such as trading off preservation of hue in order to preserve the vividness of pure colours", and the ICC-absolute colorimetric intent is "most appropriate for a proofing environment" (introduction, 0.4). The intent is the policy side of gamut mapping. The print platforms read for the colour guide do not state theirs: Printful names its proof space, PSO Coated v3, and no intent. A conversion left on the application default can clip saturated blues and greens differently from the proof the seller approved.
In practice: Colour: RGB and profile: DTG.
responsible person two different EU duties with one name, and shops merge them: Article 4 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 says a product may be placed on the market only if an economic operator established in the Union is responsible for the tasks in its paragraph 3. Paragraph 5 then limits which products: toys, machinery, personal protective equipment, electrical equipment and fourteen further instruments. Plain textile apparel appears on none of them, so Article 4 does not reach an ordinary printed tee. Where it does apply, paragraph 2 ranks who qualifies — a manufacturer in the Union, an importer where the manufacturer is outside it, a mandated authorised representative, and only "where no other economic operator ... is established in the Union" a fulfilment service provider. An EU print partner is therefore never the responsible person by default; it is the last of four names, reached only when the first three are absent. The duty that does reach a plain garment is the separate one under GPSR, and a shop reading its print partner's EU address as compliance with both has checked neither.
Reverse logistics the backward leg of a supply chain: returns, exchanges, and what happens to the goods afterwards: Everything that happens after a customer sends something back: authorising the return, deciding who pays the inbound freight, receiving it, inspecting it, and settling its disposition. Disposition is where the money is, and it has four normal outcomes: back to stock, to refurbishment, to liquidation, or to waste. A printed one-off has access to the last two only. The shirt carries another person's name, so it cannot be restocked, and the shop absorbs the blank, the ink, the labour, the outbound freight and often the return freight, then reprints from zero. Which makes a POD returns policy really a proofing policy: the cheapest return is the one prevented at approval, and shops that handle a defect claim separately from a change of mind (photo evidence, reprint, no physical return) lose less than shops running one blanket rule.
Rework rate: The share of pieces requiring a reprint (defects, complaints). The key hidden cost of POD production.
RGB the red, green and blue colour mode screens use, and the one most upload specs ask for: The colour mode that describes each pixel as red, green and blue light, the way a screen makes colour, where CMYK describes ink. Most print-on-demand platforms want it: Printify does all its operations in RGB and warns that a CMYK upload is converted and the colours might shift significantly, and Printful says its printing systems are optimized for RGB files with an embedded sRGB profile. RGB names the mode, not the colour space. sRGB and Adobe RGB are both RGB, the same pixel values mean different colours in each, and the profile embedded in the file is the only record of which one was meant. That is why Printful asks sellers to confirm the profile is embedded before they upload. A file that is RGB but carries no profile leaves the receiving software to assume one, and the seller finds out which from the sample.
In practice: DTG printing: Colour mode and profile · DTF: DTF in RGB or CMYK: upload RGB, or convert to CMYK first · Sublimation: Colour mode and embedded profile · Wall decor: Colour mode and profile · Screen printing: Colour mode and profile · UV printing: Colour mode and profile · HTV and vinyl: Colour mode and line colour · Colour: Upload RGB, or convert to CMYK first · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Colour mode and profile · Stickers: Colour mode and profile · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Colour mode and embedded profile · All-over print: Colour mode and embedded profile.
Rich black black built from all four process inks rather than black ink alone: A black built from cyan, magenta and yellow under the black ink, used on paper so large dark areas print deep instead of the slightly grey solid that black ink alone gives. Gelato specifies 60 60 60 100, a total of 280, for large elements and text in print-ready PDFs. The total is the figure that matters, because every paper and press holds only so much ink, and a black mixed by eye in a design application can run well past it. Shops get it wrong both ways: plain K on a big background prints flat and uneven beside a photo's shadows, and a heavy four-colour mix on small type spreads and picks up coloured fringes when the plates or passes do not line up. On a card or a brochure that shows as a soft black headline on a piece that is otherwise sharp, and the job goes back.
In practice: Wall decor: Ink and colour limits.
RIP raster image processor: Software that turns a graphic file into raster data for the heads: separations, white, color profile, halftoning. The ones a file-prep reader meets by name are CADlink Digital Factory on DTG and DTF, Wasatch SoftRIP and ErgoSoft, the two ChromaLuxe supports for sublimated panels, and the printer makers' own, such as Epson Garment Creator, Mimaki RasterLink and Roland VersaWorks. Caldera, neoStampa and ColorGATE are the other names on textile and wide-format floors. A setting in any of them can override what the file says, and the seller never sees which one ran.
In practice: PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Spot colours named for the RIP.

Terms beginning with S

Safe area the inner margin where text and faces survive the cut, the seam and the wrap: The zone inside the trim line, or on a garment inside the print template's edge, usually drawn as a dashed or dotted line, where anything that must not be lost belongs: text, faces, logos, signatures. Gelato starts it at least 4 mm inside the trim line on print-ready PDFs. A DTG shirt has no blade, and Printful's dotted line is there for small shifts during printing. On sublimated and all-over products the margin has to absorb placement as well as the blade: Printify says elements may move by up to 0.5 in in most cases from order to order, and Printful allows a shift of up to 2 inches in any direction on sublimation. Sellers treat the dashed line as a suggestion and push a name or a slogan to the template edge, because the mockup shows it whole. Then the cut, the seam or the wrap takes the last letter, and the complaint is about a print that matches the file exactly.
In practice: DTG printing: Bleed and safe zone · DTF: Bleed and safe zone · Sublimation: Bleed and safe zone · Wall decor: Bleed and safe zone · Screen printing: Bleed and safe zone · UV printing: Bleed, wrap and safe zone · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Bleed and safe zone: KDP and other book printers · Stickers: Sticker bleed size: bleed, border and safe zone · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Bleed and safe zone · All-over print: Bleed and safe zone.
Safety data sheet sds, the sixteen-section hazard document a chemical supplier has to hand over: Appendix D of the OSHA hazard communication standard fixes the SDS at sixteen numbered sections in a fixed order, of which sections one to eleven and sixteen are mandatory and twelve to fifteen are not. A print room reads four of them. Section 2 carries the classification and the hazard statements, section 3 names the ingredients and their concentrations, section 8 gives the exposure limits plus the engineering controls and gloves the supplier expects, and section 4 is what the first aider needs at two in the morning. The rest is written for a shipper or a fire officer. The common failure is treating the sheet as a purchasing artifact: it goes into a binder unread, so nobody notices that section 8 asked for local exhaust ventilation the shop does not have, or that section 3 lists a sensitiser at a concentration that puts an operator's hands on the line.
Satin stitch vs tatami fill the two ways of covering an area with thread, one glossy and narrow, one flat and large: Satin lays long stitches side by side across a shape so the thread stays on the surface and catches light, which is why lettering, borders and small logo elements are satin. Tatami covers an area with short stitches in offset rows, flat and matte, and it holds its shape over sizes satin cannot. Width is the dividing line, because a satin stitch long enough to catch a zip or a fingernail will eventually be pulled out. Wilcom's answer is auto split, which breaks the long stitch while keeping the satin look, with 7.00 mm suggested as the length that preserves the effect (Wilcom EmbroideryStudio help). The density trap runs in both directions: tighten satin spacing everywhere to hide a thin sew-out and the penetrations perforate the fabric, the thread starts breaking, and a head that stops every few hundred stitches costs more than the job earns. Open a tatami fill up for speed and the travel runs and row patterning show through, worst on tight curves where the flat fill has to turn (tatami density).
In practice: Embroidery: Underlay, pull compensation and density.
Screen printing ink forced through a mesh stencil, one screen per color: Ink forced through a mesh stencil with a squeegee, one screen cut per color in the design. Per-piece cost drops as run length grows, which is why it stays the default for large volume and the baseline every DTG, DTF, and UV-DTF comparison in this glossary is measured against.
Screen reclaiming and haze stripping a printed screen back to bare mesh, and the stained ghost image left behind: Reclaiming is the sequence that turns a printed screen back into a blank one: ink cleaner, then stencil remover to strip the emulsion, then a haze remover for whatever the first two left. Haze is the ghost of the last job, ink pigment and emulsion residue stained into the mesh threads. Pigment stain is usually cosmetic, while residue haze comes from emulsion that was underexposed or never fully washed out, and that kind changes how the next coat sits over the area and can print as a faint outline. The caustic dehazers strong enough to shift a locked-in stain will also eat a fine mesh if left on too long, which turns a screen you were rescuing into a frame you are re-stretching.
Section 301 tariff additional US duties on listed tariff subheadings following a Section 301 investigation: An extra duty the US Trade Representative applies to a published list of tariff subheadings after finding a trading partner's practice unreasonable under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. The China technology-transfer action is the one that reaches POD: successive lists carrying additional ad valorem duty on top of the ordinary HTSUS rate, running since 2018, with a second four-year review opened in May 2026 (Federal Register). It stands on the Trade Act and not on IEEPA, so the Supreme Court decision of February 2026 that IEEPA does not authorise tariffs left it in place. For a shop buying blanks the exposure is a per-style question rather than a rate to memorise: what is the country of origin of this garment, and is its subheading on a list. Buying from a domestic distributor does not put a shop outside it, because the duty was paid at import and is already inside the wholesale price nobody itemises.
Semi-transparent pixels pixels between fully transparent and fully opaque: Pixels whose opacity sits between empty and solid: anti-aliased edges, soft shadows, glows, fades, a low-opacity texture. A screen blends them into the background; a white-ink printer has to decide whether to put white under them. Printify's blog says any value above 0% gets solid underbase, and a 30% transparent pixel gets a 100% solid white dot underneath, which is the chalky ring round a design on a dark shirt. RIPs do not agree: CADlink Digital Factory offers an Adaptive mode that scales white by opacity as well as a switch that treats every semi-transparent pixel as opaque, and Inkthreadable calls the results in between usually unpredictable. The seller cannot see which one the shop runs, so the safe garment file has none: hard edges, or a halftone where a fade is needed. Sublimation is the exception, since there is no white ink to put under them, and Redbubble rates fades to nothing as OK there.
In practice: DTG printing: Semi-transparent pixels: forbidden, or handled by the RIP · DTF: Semi-transparent pixels: full white or graded white · Sublimation: Transparency and alpha · Screen printing: Transparency and alpha.
Sewbot / robotic sewing machine-vision robots that steer fabric through a sewing head: A workline that replaces the operator's hands with cameras and grippers: the machine maps the fabric, measures how it distorts as it feeds, and steers it through the needle. SoftWear Automation of Atlanta owns the category and the SEWBOT trademark, and the most recent hard figure it publishes about itself is a $20 million Series B1 round led by BESTSELLER, closed in August 2025. Every throughput number in circulation is older than that, and none of it sits on a spec sheet. The quoted figures trace back to one 2017 announcement about the Tianyuan Garments plant in Little Rock, which in a single article claims 21 production lines, one T-shirt every 22 seconds, and 800,000 T-shirts a day. Those three cannot all be true: 21 lines at one shirt per 22 seconds is a few thousand shirts an hour, not 800,000 a day, and other per-year totals for the same plant have been recycled since with no primary source behind them. If a sewbot rate is quoted at you, ask which garment, which fabric weight, and whether the number came off a running line or out of a press release.
Short-run offset crossover point the quantity at which an offset run beats digital per copy: Offset spends before the first good sheet: plates, makeready, the waste run up to color. Spread across enough copies that spending disappears, so offset's cost per copy falls as the quantity climbs while digital's stays close to flat, and the crossover point is where the two lines meet. Digital's side of the comparison is published and per-unit, with KDP putting the printing cost of a 333-page black-ink paperback at $5.00 whatever the volume (KDP paperback royalty). Offset's side is a quote, and a quote carries assumptions that move the crossover by hundreds of copies: paper price on the day, how cleanly the page count fills its signatures, sheetfed or web, and whether the printer is filling a slot they wanted filled. The assumption that moves it most is never in the quote at all, which is what the unsold copies are worth. A crossover computed on copies printed rather than copies sold is arithmetic about a warehouse, and the pulping bill arrives long after the decision it justified.
Signature the folded sheet that makes one section of a book: A signature is a printed sheet folded down into a section of leaves, gathered in order with the others to make the book block. Folding fixes the arithmetic, since a sheet folds into sets of 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 pages, so an offset book's page count gets pushed toward a multiple of the signature and short books are padded with blanks rather than run odd. Strictly the word names only the identifying mark printed on a section's first page to guide the binder, with section being the folded paper itself, but the trade stopped distinguishing the two long ago (Etherington and Roberts, Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology). Sheet and section are not interchangeable either, because one sheet may carry more than one section and a half sheet makes a section with fewer leaves than its neighbours (gathering). Print-on-demand meets the term mostly by its absence: KDP takes a paperback at any page count from 24 to 828 and charges by the page above 110 (KDP printing cost), so nothing pushes a page count toward a multiple of sixteen, and the saving an offset planner works for is not there to be worked for.
Single-pass: A print architecture in which the heads span the full media width, so the media passes through once with no carriage movement. The EFI Reggiani BOLT is one. Apollo and Polaris are not: they are automated lines in which a garment travels through separate white and colour stations, and the Polaris launch release describes printing in four-pass mode.
Sizing mode the fill, fit or stretch rule an order API applies when a file's shape misses the product: The per-item setting on an order that tells a print API what to do with an image whose aspect ratio differs from the product's print area. Prodigi spells out three: fillPrintArea, the default, centres and crops the image to cover the whole area; fitPrintArea shrinks it until all of it fits, usually leaving white space on two edges; stretchToPrintArea fills the area by stretching or squashing the image. Prodigi's own dashboard does the opposite of its API default: it never stretches or crops and only offers products that match the file or are smaller. Other platforms make the same decision without asking, by cropping, padding or rejecting the order. An integration that never sets the field gets the default crop, and nobody notices until a portrait comes back with the top of a head missing. Stretch is worse, because distortion on faces and type is plain from across the room.
In practice: Wall decor: Aspect mismatch: four behaviours.
Skin sensitizer (H317) h317, may cause an allergic skin reaction: H317 is the GHS and CLP hazard statement "May cause an allergic skin reaction", carrying the exclamation-mark pictogram and the signal word Warning, and it lands in section 2 of the safety data sheet. It sits on a lot of water-based textile chemistry, because the preservatives that stop a water-carried ink going sour are frequently isothiazolinones. The CMIT/MIT reaction mass has a harmonised H317 in Annex VI of Regulation (EC) No 1272/2008, and Annex II point 2.8 of the same regulation makes a mixture that is not itself classified as sensitising still carry EUH208, "Contains (name of sensitising substance). May produce an allergic reaction", once a sensitiser reaches 0,1%. So an ink can be sold as water-based, plastisol-free and low-odour and still be the thing that sensitises a printer. Sensitisation has no dose you can manage down to: once someone reacts, a trace sets it off, and that operator is done with that chemistry for good.
Soft proofing judging output on a calibrated display, through the output profile, instead of on the substrate: Soft proofing is simulating an output condition on screen: the file is converted through the output profile and back into the display profile, so the monitor previews what that ink, that substrate and that press can actually reach. It is worth precisely what its conditions are worth. The display has to be profiled and held at a known white point and luminance, which is what ISO 12646 covers for proofing displays; the room has to be dim enough not to wash the screen; and any physical sample compared against it has to sit under viewing light conforming to ISO 3664, not under whatever fixture is above the workstation. Two things stay outside the simulation whatever you do, and both matter on garments: surface texture, and the metamerism between an emissive screen and a reflective print. Keep the ritual and drop the conditions and you get the worst outcome on offer, which is a customer who approved a screen, a sample that does not match it, and an argument in which both parties are describing something they really saw.
Spine width the thickness of the book block, which sets the middle panel of the cover file: The width of the spine panel on a flat cover, set by page count and paper. KDP builds the cover width as bleed, back cover, spine, front cover and bleed, so the cover file is as wide as the spine makes it. Lulu gives formulas for softcover perfect binding: pages divided by 444, plus 0.06 in, or pages divided by 460 plus 0.06 in for 460 PPI paper used for magazines and comics (pages per inch). Hardcover casewrap and linen with dust jacket use a table instead, from 0.25 in at 24 to 84 pages to 2.125 in at 800 pages or more. Saddle stitch and coil binding have no spine. Because the number depends on the final page count, the cover cannot be finished before the interior is. Change the page count after the cover is built and the spine panel and the art on it no longer match the book.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Spine width and spine text: KDP and other book printers.
Spoilage allowance the share of an order a decorator may ruin without owing replacements: A spoilage allowance is the share of an order a decorator is permitted to misprint, scorch or otherwise destroy without owing the customer a replacement, written into the agreement rather than argued about afterwards. Some of that loss is structural: pieces burned setting registration and color, a press that mis-lays one, a blank whose flaw only shows under heat. Accepted practice in garment decorating sits in the low single digits, and the figure is the contract printer's to state before the job starts rather than a number a customer should assume. The allowance covers goods and not the count, so an order still ships short unless the customer sent overage, and on customer-supplied blanks you may be hunting a size or color that can no longer be bought.
Spot color a named ink printed as itself instead of built up from process dots: A spot color is one ink, mixed to a named standard, printed from its own screen or press unit instead of being simulated with overlapping process dots. Printed as a solid it carries no halftone dots, so it cannot drift the way a four-color build does when gain stacks up across screens. Screen that same ink back into a tint and gain is in play again, and on a garment the bigger variable is the ink film left on the cloth and whatever sits underneath, so the same Pantone number over a thin white underbase reads darker and duller than the chip. That is the reprint a shop pays for: the ink was right, the underbase was not, and a batch mixed for one job is hard to sell into another.
In practice: Screen printing: Pantone and spot colours · UV printing: UV printing white ink and varnish: white and varnish channels · Colour: Screen printing: Pantone and spot colours · Stickers: Sticker cut line: path form, colour, name and layer · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Spot colours named for the RIP · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Convert the spot colour, or name it.
Spot color replacement a RIP overriding a named color with a recipe measured on your own press and substrate: Spot color replacement is the RIP intercepting a named color in the file, a PANTONE number or a brand's own swatch name, and printing a stored recipe for it instead of whatever the normal color conversion would have produced. The named-color libraries hold each color as a device-independent Lab value, and the RIP computes the best available reproduction for each output profile, recalculating the equivalents every time a profile is generated or updated. Treat that computed value as a starting point, not an answer: the recipe worth storing is the one you printed, measured with a spectrophotometer and entered back into the definition, because it is the only one that accounts for your ink film and what sits under it. Two traps follow. A replacement is bound to the output profile it was made against, so a brand red that lands on white cotton is quietly wrong on a heather blank; and a spot name that does not match the library exactly, one extra space or a lowercase suffix, matches nothing and passes through to a process build that nobody inspected before the run.
Spreadconnect formerly SPOD, Spread Group's fulfillment product for sellers who keep their own storefront: Spread Group's answer to Printful and Printify: you sell, Spreadconnect prints and ships, the storefront stays yours. It connects through apps for Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Magento, Shopware and TikTok Shop, through Order Desk for marketplaces, or straight against its REST API. The old SPOD name is still load-bearing in the plumbing: faq.spod.com redirects to faq.spreadconnect.app, and the Order Desk listing is still called Spreadconnect/SPOD. The legal entity did not change with the name. Its own terms name Spreadshirt Print On Demand GmbH as the contracting party and put disputes before the courts of Leipzig, and there is no subscription or setup fee: you are invoiced base price plus shipping per order and keep whatever you set above it. Search for SPOD documentation and you land on pages answering under a different name, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes a rate card from an old bookmark.
Squeegee the polyurethane blade that pushes ink through the mesh and meters what gets through: The polyurethane blade in a holder that drives ink across the screen and through the open mesh, and the variable operators argue about, because three of its properties move the deposit at once: hardness in Shore A, edge profile, and the angle and pressure applied to it. Fimor, which makes the serilor blades, sells down to 35 to 55 Shore A for direct printing on ceramics and builds multi-layer blades pairing soft polyurethane for conformity with hard polyurethane for mechanical resistance, which is the whole argument in one product: soft floods, hard shears, and a layered blade tries to do both. Blades are consumables and they wear round, so the same maker's care notes say to sharpen only dry blades, never one still soaked with solvent, and never to take too much material off in a single pass; it also warns that storage temperature and humidity move the hardness you paid for. The error is chasing deposit with pressure, because a rounded edge and a harder push look like the same fix on the first shirt and only one of them is free. A rounded blade fills the dots on a halftone job quietly, and the run is already on the pallets before anyone reads a shirt properly.
sRGB IEC61966-2.1 the standard RGB colour space, and the profile name upload specs ask for: sRGB is the RGB colour space most monitors, browsers and design applications assume, and sRGB IEC61966-2.1 is the ICC profile that describes it, the string a designer sees in the save or export dialog. Printful asks for it by name, says its printing systems are optimized for files with an embedded sRGB profile, and warns that Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB can cause unexpected colour shifts. The mistake runs both ways. A photographer uploads a wide-gamut file to a pipeline that reads it as sRGB and the colour moves; a designer converts to CMYK first to be safe and throws away gamut before the RIP ever sees the file. Converting is right only where the shop says so: Transfer Kingdom wants CMYK and Transfer Superstars wants it converted with FOGRA39 on DTF, and SAIC's print bureau asks for Adobe RGB 1998. Neither shows on the uploader's screen, so the first anyone hears of it is a sample that does not match the approved mockup.
In practice: DTG printing: Colour mode and profile · DTF: Colour mode and profile · Sublimation: Colour mode and embedded profile · Wall decor: Colour mode and profile · Embroidery: Colour mode and profile · UV printing: Colour mode and profile · Colour: Is sRGB or Adobe RGB better for printing? · KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Colour mode and profile · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Colour mode and embedded profile · All-over print: Colour mode and embedded profile.
Staggered nozzle array heads and nozzle rows offset from each other so their nozzles interleave into one continuous print width: A staggered array is what you build when one head is narrower than the job: several heads are mounted in two or more rows, each offset across the width and set back along the travel direction, until their nozzles interleave into a single continuous line. The same trick runs inside a head, where nozzle rows are offset so the spacing projected onto one line is finer than the gap between any two neighbours in a row. The offset has to be paid back in the controller, which delays firing of the downstream row by exactly the time the substrate needs to travel between rows, and head geometry is designed around that constraint: Xaar's nest architecture shapes the printhead so heads align with one another without deepening the array. Get the delay or the mechanical alignment wrong and the two halves of the image stop sitting on the same line: a solid shows a pale or dark stripe at every head join, running the length of the roll or straight down the middle of a chest print. It is easy to misread as banding, and the way to tell them apart is the spacing, because a stagger error repeats at the head-to-head pitch on the bar rather than at the pass pitch. Nothing in the RIP fixes it, so the pieces printed before anyone looked at the seam are scrap.
Stitch count: The number of needle penetrations in an embroidery design. It is what embroidery is priced and scheduled in, the way impressions are for print: time on a machine head follows the stitch count, not the size of the logo.
In practice: Embroidery: Stitch count.
Stitch density how closely rows of stitches are packed, set as spacing in millimetres: The distance between neighbouring rows of stitches in a fill or satin column, which decides how many stitches cover an area and whether the fabric shows through. A smaller number is denser. Coats puts the cost on it: an area sewn at 0.55 mm uses 20% fewer stitches than the same area at 0.40 mm, and underlay plus a cover fill uses fewer stitches than cover stitching alone. Both ends fail. Coats warns that density set too high causes thread breaks and density too low leaves gaps where the fabric colour shows through. Wilcom works an example of a 4 mm satin column at 0.4 mm spacing and notes that stitches bunched on the inside of a curve break thread too. It is a digitising setting, so the seller does not type it in, but a design shrunk after digitising keeps its stitch count in a smaller area and ends up far denser than intended. Resize the source art and have it redigitised, rather than scaling the stitch file.
In practice: Embroidery: Underlay, pull compensation and density.
Stitch file (DST, PES) the machine-ready embroidery file: needle positions and machine commands, not shapes: The file an embroidery machine runs. Printful lists the machine formats as DST, PES, EXP, JEF, VP3 and others by machine, and keeps them apart from the digitiser's working files, native formats such as EMB, OFM or CND plus the AI, SVG or PSD source. A machine file holds stitch data and machine functions. Wilcom notes that its older T0? formats, Tajima DST among them, were made to carry stitch data that could be punched onto paper tapes. Open one without object recognition and Wilcom reads DST as Tajima, turns stop codes into colour changes or stops, and builds only manual objects wherever it finds colour changes or trims, so the fills, outlines and settings of the original design are gone. Minor edits and scaling are possible, but a stitch file scaled up or down keeps its old stitch density and pull compensation, so the result sews thin or packed. Keep the native file; send the stitch file in the format the shop's machine asks for.
In practice: Embroidery: File format and digitising.
Storefront integration vs API integration connecting through the platform's app, or building against the fulfiller's API: A storefront integration is the fulfiller's app on Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce or TikTok Shop: products sync out, orders import back, and the sales platform owns the checkout. An API integration is a store with no shopfront at all. Printful calls it a manual order / API store, and products published there are visible to nobody until your own code pulls them and renders them. What each one locks in is feature coverage, not just effort: Printful publishes a table of which features work on which integration, and live shipping rates on Shopify need the Advanced or Plus plan, or Grow plus $20/mo. The hosted middle option has its own limits: Printful's Quick Stores are US only, take no custom domain, and are not fully white label. Pick the app because it is quick and you inherit whatever that integration does not support; pick the API because it does everything, and shipping, tax and personalization are now yours to build and maintain.
Stretcher bar the wooden frame a canvas is pulled over, whose depth sets the wrap allowance: The wooden frame a printed canvas is stretched over and fastened to at the back. Its depth decides how much image the file has to carry beyond the visible face: Prodigi adds 0.75 inch per edge for a 19 mm bar and 1.575 inch per edge for a 38 mm one, and Gelato works the sum for a 200 × 300 mm face on 2 cm bars as a 298 × 398 mm file. The same canvas size is often sold on two depths, so a file built for the slim bar and ordered on the deep one runs out of image on the sides. The lab's remaining options are the ones Prodigi lists, a flat colour or a mirror, or it stretches the image further and takes more off the front, and none of those is what the customer approved on the mockup.
In practice: Wall decor: Canvas wrap.
Sublimation: Dye turns to gas under heat and penetrates polyester or a polymer coating, so the print sits “in the fabric”, or in the coating of a mug or panel. There is no white ink, so the blank has to be white or light, and it needs something for the dye to bond to: Sawgrass names 65/35 polycotton as the lowest blend for its Sublijet UHD ink, and an uncoated hard good comes out pale and patchy.
Sublimation blanks sub blanks, hardgoods made or coated to take sublimation dye: A sublimation blank is a substrate carrying a polyester or polymer coating for the disperse dye to dissolve into, which is the whole difference between a sublimation mug and a mug. JPPlus states the requirement plainly: sublimation blanks need a polymer or polyester coating, and on fabric the target is 100% polyester or at least a 65% blend. An uncoated ceramic mug, bare aluminium or plain glass is not a blank; it is an object you would have to spray with a sublimation coating first, and a sprayed coating is not the same product as a factory-cured one. This is where the drinkware and hardgoods half of print on demand actually lives, and it is also where blanks get bought on price by people reading the word mug and not the word coated. The fault shows at the press, usually on a personalised run with a different name on every piece, so it is the whole job that reprints rather than one line of it.
Sublimation coating the polymer layer that gives dye somewhere to go on a mug, a metal panel or a tile: A polyester-based polymer layer applied to a hard blank so that sublimation dye has something to lodge in, because bare aluminium, glass and ceramic offer nothing. Beaver Paper states the rule in one line: any polyester fabric, or any hard surface carrying a polyester coating, can be sublimated. ChromaLuxe describes its own panels the same way, as a coating that lets the image be infused into the surface rather than printed on top of it, and sells that coating in gloss, semi-gloss and matte, clear and white. The coating is the product; the metal is a carrier for it. Swap to a cheaper blank and the colour, the gloss level and the scratch resistance all move at once while the press settings sit exactly where they were, which is how a shop spends three days chasing the fault into the ink and the profile. The panel that comes back washed out or scuffed was decided at purchase.
SVG Scalable Vector Graphics, the open W3C vector format: The W3C specification calls SVG a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and an application of XML, with three kinds of object: vector graphic shapes such as paths, images and text. Because it is open and plain text, cutting software and many platforms read it as a vector file. That third object type is the catch. An SVG can hold an embedded bitmap and nothing else, and a cutter or a separation RIP then has no paths to follow, whatever the extension says. Text is the other trap: live type in an SVG depends on the receiving machine having the font, so outline it before sending. DTG, DTF and sublimation print pixels, so an SVG sent there is rasterised somewhere before the print head, and the file has lost its advantage. Check the file in a plain viewer before upload: if zooming in shows pixels, it is not the vector the job needs.
In practice: HTV and vinyl: File format · Screen printing: File format · Embroidery: File format and digitising · DTG printing: File format · Resolution and DPI: PDF/X and vector files · All-over print: File format and size.
synthetic performer new york's name for the AI-generated human in a product mockup: New York Senate bill 8420-A, signed as chapter 617 on 11 December 2025, adds the term to General Business Law 396-b. The statute defines it as a digitally created asset made or modified by computer using generative artificial intelligence or a software algorithm, intended to create the impression that it is engaging in a visual or audiovisual performance of a human performer who is not any identifiable natural performer. Anyone who produces or creates an advertisement for property or a service must conspicuously disclose that a synthetic performer is in it, where that person has actual knowledge, at a civil penalty of one thousand dollars for a first violation and five thousand for each one after. The act took effect on the one hundred eightieth day after becoming law, which is 9 June 2026. Subdivision 8 exempts the medium, so the duty sits on the seller and not on the marketplace, the ad network, or the platform whose stock mockup supplied the model. A shop that has never opened an AI tool is inside this rule the moment its print partner's default mockup contains one.

Terms beginning with T

Tacky transfer paper sublimation paper with a heat-activated tack that grips the fabric so neither can move: Sublimation transfer paper coated so that heat makes it grip the goods, instead of lying loose on them the way plain paper does. Beaver Paper sells the same grade in two tack weights, light and heavy, and states what they are for: sportswear and activewear, the fabrics that shrink and move while the image is going in. That movement is the whole reason the product exists, because a garment contracting under the platen, or a sheet floating when the press opens, prints a second offset copy of the image. Tack is not free. These papers are made for soft substrates, so reaching for one on a mug or a metal panel solves nothing, and on a knit that would otherwise creep, heat tape at the corners is the cheap version of the same idea. Pin down the word release before ordering: on the sublimation side it describes how readily a paper gives up its dye, and in film lamination it means the siliconized liner an adhesive is stuck to, which is a different product on a different shelf.
Takt time the interval a line has to finish one unit in to meet the day's demand: Available production time divided by customer demand. A plant running 480 minutes a day against demand for 240 units has a takt of two minutes: one finished unit every two minutes, all day. It is not throughput. Throughput is what the line did, takt is what it has to do, and any station whose cycle time exceeds takt is the constraint whether or not it looks busy. In print-on-demand the number moves under you, because demand is the live order book rather than a forecast, so takt gets recomputed per shift instead of fixed once at line design. The word is German for a beat of time, and it reached production planning through 1930s aircraft assembly, as the interval at which an airframe was moved to the next station.
Tariff-rate quota TRQ, a low duty rate up to a set quantity and a higher one past it: Two rates for the same goods, separated by quantity. US customs regulations define a tariff-rate quota as permitting a specified quantity of merchandise to be entered at a reduced duty rate during a specified period (19 CFR 132.1); once that quantity fills, the rest of the period pays the ordinary rate. Entries count from the moment of presentation, so a quota is a queue, and arriving after the fill is not something a broker can argue away. In apparel the same mechanism usually appears as a tariff preference level in a trade agreement, letting a capped quantity of otherwise non-qualifying garments claim the preferential rate, administered by CBP alongside the quotas (CBP). For a shop this is a supplier question rather than a customs one: a blank price quoted against an in-quota entry is not the same price once the level fills, and a supplier who cannot say which side of the line a shipment landed on has quoted a number that can still move after the shirts are printed.
Tearaway and wash-away stabilizer backings meant to leave the garment, one torn off, one dissolved: Both are hooped under the fabric the way cutaway backing is, and both are supposed to be gone by the time the garment ships. Tearaway is a non-woven pulled away from inside and outside the design once it comes off the machine, and it belongs on stable wovens: denim, canvas, jacket backs. Madeira's own guidance is to pick the weight from the design and not the fabric alone, because the larger and denser the design, the heavier the backing it needs (Madeira E-Zee Tear Away). Wash-away is a mesh that dissolves in warm water, used for lace, patches, emblems, applique and anything where the back of the stitching will be seen (Madeira E-Zee Cut Washaway), and its film relative goes on top of pile so the stitches do not sink. The failure is reaching for tearaway on a knit because it is quicker to clean up: the backing leaves, the knit is on its own, and the logo distorts the first time the shirt is stretched. Tearing is mechanical work on the stitches at the edge of the design too, so half-torn backing under a tight satin border is a defect the customer finds before you do.
Thin-film piezo a printhead whose piezo layer is grown as a film on a silicon wafer instead of pressed and fired as bulk ceramic: Thin-film piezo is a printhead construction in which the PZT actuator is deposited as a film on a silicon wafer, by sputtering or by a sol-gel process, with the fluid channels and nozzles formed around it by MEMS fabrication. Bulk piezo goes the other way: finely milled ceramic powder is compressed into pucks, sintered in a furnace into crystal grains of random orientation, then poled with a strong electric field that drags those grains into rough alignment. Poling is the distinction worth knowing, because forced alignment tends to revert under heat and stress, while sputtered film grows already aligned on its electrode and takes no separate poling step at all. Head construction is not something you change on the floor, so it reaches you as head life and as drift: a head losing drop velocity part-way through a run leaves a fading solid, a scrapped set of pieces and a press standing while it is swapped.
TIFF Tagged Image File Format, the raster format that can carry extra channels: A tag-based raster format, which the Library of Congress format description lists in uncompressed, LZW and Group 4 variants, with the specification now controlled by Adobe. In print it earns its place over PNG because it can carry more than colour: ONYX describes TIF as supporting multiple channels beyond CMYK or RGB, which is how a white, varnish or primer layer travels to a UV or DTF RIP as a named spot channel. A PNG drops those channels, and so does a TIFF flattened on export. One more fault is common. When a transparent TIFF placed in an illustration is exported as EPS or PS, Mimaki RasterLink7 then treats the whole TIFF rectangle as data, so the special-colour plate covers the rectangle instead of the shape, and Mimaki says to save it as PDF. Open the file in a second program before upload and count the channels.
In practice: UV printing: File format · Screen printing: File format · DTF: File format · DTG printing: File format · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Solid block under a transparent TIFF.
Titanium dioxide tio2, the white pigment that makes white ink opaque and heavy: Titanium dioxide, CAS 13463-67-7, is the pigment doing the work in white DTG and DTF ink and in the underbase beneath a dark-garment print, and it is why white is the channel that settles, needs recirculation and wears parts out. Its regulatory story is settled and widely mis-told. The EU harmonised classification as a category 2 carcinogen by inhalation, for powder forms containing 1% or more of particles 10 µm or smaller, was introduced by Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2020/217, annulled by the General Court in November 2022, and the Court of Justice dismissed the Commission's and France's appeals against that annulment on 1 August 2025, in Joined Cases C-71/23 P and C-82/23 P. The occupational side did not move, and a shop's own paperwork still carries it: Kornit's safety data sheet for NeoPigment Eco-Rapid White lists NIOSH's potential occupational carcinogen notation alongside ACGIH 2024 limits of 2.5 mg/m³ for fine and 0.2 mg/m³ for respirable nano titanium dioxide. That same sheet says the pigment in the ink is a liquid dispersion, immobilised in a binder once dry, which is the line that tells an operator where the exposure actually sits: dry powder handling, not a printed shirt.
Total cost of printing (TCP) kornit's term for the whole cost stack around a print, not just the ink and the blank: Kornit's own name for everything a print costs beyond the consumables: administering the order, designing it, creating it, printing it, the pieces printed and binned, and delivering the result to whoever bought it. Kornit's glossary puts printing itself at 15% of that total and administration at 60%, which is a machine seller's split published to make the case for automation, so read it as their figure and not as an industry constant. The shape is the useful part. A shop measures the cost it can change least, because ink per square metre and film per sheet arrive on an invoice, while the order desk, the artwork fixes, the address corrections and the reprints sit inside salaries that never get allocated to a job. Cost per print is the denominator; TCP is the argument that the denominator is the small half.
Total ink limit TAC, total area coverage — the ceiling on how much ink all channels together may put on one spot: The total ink limit is the cap on the sum of all channel values at any single point in the image, written as a percentage and often called TAC, for total area coverage. It belongs to calibration rather than to profiling, and it is not the first step: Fiery XF limits the ink per channel first, reduces the total ink limit next, and implements a custom media profile last, because a profile measured on a press that is already over-inked measures the flooding as if it were color. The headroom is larger than it sounds and the usable figure much smaller: an eight-channel printer has a theoretical maximum of 800%, while what a garment will physically accept is a fraction of it. On textile the penalty arrives fast, and ONYX names the artifacts of too much ink plainly as ink bleed, an embossed or raised look, a picture frame appearance, or a glossy or dull appearance; add to that a plastic hand, ink the tunnel never fully cures, and wash-fastness that fails on a shirt which looked perfect coming off the dryer. Set it too low and you throw away gamut you already paid for, with grey blacks and saturated colors that never arrive. The number belongs to one combination of ink, substrate, resolution and cure, so a limit copied from a vendor media profile onto a different blank is a reprint waiting for its first wash test.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Maximum ink and TAC · Stickers: Maximum ink and colour count · All-over print: Ink limits.
Total organic fluorine tof, one combustion measurement of all organically bound fluorine in a sample: TOF measures fluorine, not PFAS. A lab burns the sample and totals the organically bound fluorine, giving one number that stands in for thousands of possible compounds, so it answers whether fluorine chemistry is present rather than which substance and how much. Regulators lean on it because targeted analysis cannot keep pace: California's apparel and textile rule defines regulated PFAS as either intentionally added PFAS or presence at or above a threshold measured in total organic fluorine, 100 ppm from 1 January 2025 and 50 ppm from 1 January 2027. A screen result over the line is a trigger for questions, not a named chemical and not a count. For a decorator the consequence is upstream, since the fluorine sits in the blank's finish rather than in the ink, which is the point the PFAS entry makes. The answer to a TOF number is therefore a supplier conversation and the certificate of compliance the same law obliges the manufacturer to provide, not a test the shop runs itself.
Trapping overlapping adjoining colours slightly so press movement cannot open a gap: Extending one colour a little under or over its neighbour, so that when screens or passes land a fraction off, the garment does not show through between them. It is the colour-to-colour counterpart of choke, which pulls the white underbase in under the top colours. Thomas Trimingham in Screen Printing Magazine sizes it from a test print: double the largest gap you see, so a 1/64 inch gap calls for a 1/32 inch trap, and specialty items such as mugs and balloons can need much more. The same article warns that too much trap brings bleeding, lost detail and colour shift where the inks stack. The point figures printed beside those fractions are twice their true values, so work from the fractions. Trap is a separation setting, not something a seller adds by hand to a file sent to a print-on-demand platform, but a design built from colours that only touch at hairline edges, with no outline and no gap, is the one that needs it most. Skip it and a halo of shirt colour appears along every edge on a press that has drifted by a thread's width.
In practice: Screen printing: Trapping and choke.
Trim size the finished width and height of a book after it is cut: The size of the printed book as it leaves the guillotine. KDP defines it as the book's width and height, and every other measurement in the file is set from it. A page that carries bleed is larger than the trim: KDP adds 0.125 in to the width and 0.125 in at top and bottom, so a 6 x 9 in book gets a 6.125 x 9.25 in page, and the blade takes 0.125 in (3.2 mm) from the top, bottom and outside edges. IngramSpark defines bleed as the area beyond the edge before trimming, lets a file with no bleed be submitted at trim size, and asks for 0.125 in of bleed on the three outer edges of an interior. The page size is therefore not the book size, and one export reused across platforms is wrong at every platform but one, because each adds its own bleed. The usual fault is a file built at the trim size with art that runs to the edge, so a white sliver shows on one side of some copies.
In practice: KDP spine width, bleed and cover size: Print area and trim size · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Trim, bleed and marks in the PDF: book printers.

Terms beginning with U

Underbase the opaque white layer between the colour and the garment: The white ink layer that sits between the colour and the garment, so the colors read as themselves instead of picking up the fabric underneath. On DTG it goes down first, straight onto a dark shirt. On DTF the order reverses: the printer lays the colour on the film first and the white over it, and there the white also works as the binder for the adhesive powder, so it does a structural job as well as an optical one. Its opacity and its registration with the layers above decide whether the print looks clean or muddy. Too thin and the colors go dull; too heavy and the print stiffens, which the customer feels before they look at it.
In practice: DTG printing: White handling · DTF: White handling · Screen printing: White handling.
Underlay the stitches sewn first, underneath the ones you see: Underlay is the layer an embroidery machine stitches before the cover stitches, tying the fabric to the backing and giving the top thread something to sit on. Wilcom's manual is blunt about the alternative: without underlay the embroidery lies flat on the fabric, which often shows through, and the cover stitches sink into anything soft (Wilcom EmbroideryStudio help). It also flattens nap, so a logo on fleece or pique reads as a logo instead of thread lost in pile. The mistake shops make is answering a thin sew-out by raising density, when the fix is underlay: more thread through the same holes perforates the cloth and pulls it harder. Type follows shape, and the manual is specific, with a centre run stabilising a narrow column of 2-3 mm while large shapes want an edge run plus a zigzag or tatami layer (run stitch underlay settings). Underlay adds stitch count, so it adds machine minutes, which is why it is the first thing trimmed on a price-driven quote and the first thing missing when the sample comes back puckered.
In practice: Embroidery: Underlay, pull compensation and density.
Unit production system (UPS) an overhead rail that carries one garment at a time between sewing stations: The overhead rail and hanging carriers that move a single garment, or one bundle of cut parts, from sewing station to sewing station, so the operator never leaves the machine to fetch work. Eton Systems was founded in 1967 alongside the Eton shirt factory in Sweden and built the first one there, and it is still the reference vendor, with more than 5,000 installations claimed worldwide. The conveyor is not the product. Every carrier is tracked, so the software balances load across stations, holds a buffer in front of a slow operation, and can say where one made-to-measure jacket is; Joseph Abboud's New Bedford plant reports a 30% lead-time reduction on an Eton rail. Read the daily output on that page twice: the stat block says 1,000 tailored suits a day and the paragraph below it says more than 1,000 jackets and pants, which is not the same count. Two cautions. The acronym collides with United Parcel Service, so a line called UPS in a POD spreadsheet is either the sewing rail or the carrier bill and never both, and shops buy the rail as a transport upgrade when the payback is actually in operator idle time and work in progress.
Upscaling enlarging an image by inventing pixels it did not have: Enlarging a raster image by interpolating new pixels, whether the seller does it, an AI tool does it or the platform does it. It raises the DPI figure without adding detail. DTF Transfers Now puts the arithmetic plainly: a 300 DPI file scaled up to double its size is really a 150 DPI file. Printful tells sellers not to enlarge a small, low-resolution image and expect it to print sharply. Printify enhances low-resolution designs automatically but says designs with artificially increased resolution cannot be detected by its tool, so a seller who upscales first switches the platform's own fix off. Some platforms upscale without asking: Printumo enlarges artwork that falls short of the product size or of its DPI minimums. The complaint arrives as a soft print from a file whose DPI tag said 300.
In practice: DTG printing: Grainy, blurry print from Save for Web or an upscaled file · Wall decor: Upscaling · Resolution and DPI: Upscaling and the DPI tag · Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Resolution at print size.
UV cure dose the total UV energy each square centimeter of the print receives on its way past the lamp: The total ultraviolet energy delivered to each square centimeter of a print as it passes the lamp, measured in mJ/cm² and equal to irradiance summed over the time of exposure. Dose is not lamp wattage, and two lines reporting the same dose can cure differently, because peak irradiance drives how deep the cure goes: a weak lamp run slowly is not the equivalent of a strong lamp run fast. A reading also means something only for the wavelength band the radiometer covers, and only when it is taken at the surface being cured, which is why a puck sent through the machine beats the number on the control panel. Lamp output falls off gradually, so an unmeasured line drifts under-dosed and ships work with a cured-looking skin over soft ink that fails on adhesion after it has left the building.
UV rotary printing printing UV ink around a cylindrical or tapered object as it turns on a rotary attachment: A rotary attachment holds the object and turns it under the print head of a UV printer, so the artwork wraps all the way round. Mimaki's Kebab HS prints 360 degrees while the cylinder rotates on a shaft that fixes the object, takes diameters of 50 to 100 mm (2.0 to 3.9 in) and lengths of 30 to 300 mm (1.2 to 11.8 in, up to 280 mm with the adaptor), and handles tapers of 0 to 7.5 degrees. On a tapered object the print area compresses from the large diameter to the small one, which compresses the print as well; the RasterLinkTools plug-in corrects the warp. Mimaki's how-to for the Kebab says the data needs no registration marks, cut lines or margins, may be EPS, JPEG, PDF or TIFF, and gives the circumference as the diameter times 3.14 mm. The file is sized to the object, not to a template for a flat press. It is the process behind the UV rotary row in the drinkware guide, and a file made for flatbed UV does not carry over unchanged.
In practice: Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Process rows: sublimation press, UV rotary and ceramic decal · UV printing: Print area and canvas size.
UV-DTF: A DTF variant with UV inks for hard surfaces (mugs, gadgets); a transfer sticker, no press needed.
In practice: UV printing: UV-DTF film: choke, bleed, spacing and cut lines · Colour: UV flatbed and UV-DTF: CMYK or RGB, embedded profiles and spot channels · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: PDF into a RIP: DTF and UV.

Terms beginning with V

Varnish (UV) a clear ink printed as its own layer for gloss, matte or a raised surface: A clear UV ink laid on its own channel over or beside the colour, for a gloss or matte finish, a protective coat or a raised feel. ONYX classes it with white, metallic and gloss enhancers as a non-chromatic spot ink, kept out of colour management, and its RIP picks up a spot colour named Spot1, Spot2 and so on without extra mapping. The name is per RIP, so the file has to use the one the shop's RIP expects. DTF Transfer Studio notes that PNG and JPEG do not keep named spot channels, so the varnish has to travel as a TIFF or PDF. The Epson V-Series best practices published by Grimco list the trade-offs: varnish is less flexible than the other inks and can chip if bent beyond 165 degrees, heavy varnish shows dust, and a 20-30% layer gives a more matte look while keeping some protection. Their V7000 cures varnish to gloss only. The common fault is a varnish channel that arrives empty or flattened into the colour, so the job prints with no varnish and nobody notices until the customer asks where the gloss went.
In practice: UV printing: Gloss, varnish and primer · UV printing: UV printing white ink and varnish: white and varnish channels · Colour: Spot colour knocks out the design underneath · Stickers: White ink on clear sticker paper: who builds the white layer on clear, holographic or metallic stock.
Vector vs raster artwork built from paths versus artwork built from pixels: Two ways a file stores a picture. Custom Ink puts it plainly: a raster image is a grid of coloured pixels, a vector image is defined by mathematical paths, and a vector has no fixed resolution, so it scales from a business card to a billboard while a raster blurs or blocks as it grows. Custom Ink lists .ai, .eps, .pdf, .svg and .cdr as vector types and .jpg, .png, .gif, .psd, .tif and .bmp as raster, with its own floor at 200 DPI at print size. The extension does not settle it. A PDF, EPS or SVG can carry nothing but an embedded photo, and that file is still raster under a vector name. The difference decides the process: cutters for heat-transfer vinyl and screen-printing separations want paths, because a blade and a spot screen follow edges, while DTG, DTF and sublimation print pixels either way. A pixel logo sent where paths were expected comes back either redrawn as a vectorisation job, or cut along a stair-stepped edge that follows every pixel.
In practice: HTV and vinyl: Vectors and cut lines · Screen printing: File format · Embroidery: File format and digitising · UV printing: File format · DTF: File format · Resolution and DPI: PDF/X and vector files · Stickers: File format · PDF/X-1a vs X-4 and printer PDF rules: Vector PDF: screen printing.

Terms beginning with W

Wash fastness test a standardized laundering cycle used to judge how a decorated garment survives washing: A wash fastness test is a standardized laundering cycle, such as AATCC's TM61 accelerated laundering method or ISO 105-C06, the domestic and commercial laundering test written into European retail specs, run to judge how far a decorated garment changes after a controlled number of washes. Everything that matters is fixed by the method: water temperature, detergent, mechanical action, load and drying, which is what makes one lab's result comparable to another's. Grading is against gray scales for color change and for staining onto adjacent fabric, so it reports shade and appearance rather than whether the print stayed attached, and cracking or edge lift is a separate judgement. A shop usually meets this as a customer's spec sheet or a retailer's audit, where a failed report is not one reprint but a rejected delivery, followed by the argument over whether the blank or the decoration caused it.
Water-based ink textile ink carried in water instead of PVC and plasticizer: This is the screen-printing sense. When a digital spec says water-based, as Printful does for its All-Over Cotton, it means pigment ink fired from an inkjet head, covered under pigment ink, and the mesh problem below does not arise. Water-based screen ink suspends pigment and a binder in water, so the print penetrates the fibers rather than sitting on top of them the way plastisol does. The soft hand comes from that penetration, and so does the main operating headache: the carrier evaporates, so the ink begins drying in the mesh the moment the press stops. Plastisol has no solvent to lose and will sit in a screen for hours without hardening. Water-based will block a fine mesh in minutes, and every block costs a wash-out, a re-registration, and whatever garments went through half-printed before anyone caught it.
White label the parcel carries the seller's name and nothing about who printed it: The fulfiller prints, packs and ships, and nothing in the box names them. Printful states its shipments carry no Printful branding and its packing slips are white label; Printify states its name appears nowhere on the package or the shipping label. Two defaults still bite. The return address is the fulfiller's unbranded facility until you change it, and Printify accepts custom return addresses only in the UK, Germany and the US, only with providers that support the feature, and only when the order is fulfilled in the same country as that address. The other is customs: domestic slips show no prices, but international parcels carry retail prices on the outside. Orders sent to a backup or partner facility lose the custom slip and the logo, so the buyer who got your branded parcel in March gets a plain one in November, and support hears about it.
White layer a layer of white ink printed behind the colours so they stay opaque on clear or reflective stock: StickerGiant describes it as an additional layer of white ink printed behind the design to make chosen areas completely opaque, and says that without it even coloured areas on a clear sticker appear transparent. Its file setup is a separate layer, named White Ink Layer, holding a copy of the artwork turned white at 100% opacity; areas left empty, or set to 0%, let the clear material show through. Sticker Mule works the other way: all of its custom clear stickers are printed with white ink behind the design, and a white-ink-only sticker may still be slightly translucent on a dark surface. Who builds the layer therefore differs by shop, and the same transparent PNG can come out opaque at one and see-through at another. On holographic stock Redbubble says there is no white underlay at all. In UV-DTF, PNW Print Co says its RIP makes the white layer slightly smaller than the design, the choke, so no white outline shows around the colour. Ask whether the printer generates the layer or expects it in the file before drawing it.
In practice: Stickers: White ink on clear sticker paper: who builds the white layer on clear, holographic or metallic stock · UV printing: UV-DTF film: choke, bleed, spacing and cut lines.
Wrap seam the line where the two ends of a wrapped print meet, which on a mug sits under the handle: The place where the ends of a print that goes round an object meet. On a full-wrap mug 4OVER4 says the two short ends of the band are where the wrap closes, and on the finished mug that seam sits under the handle; it also says the handle eats both ends of the wrap and that a logo at either end ends up half behind the ceramic. Vistaprint notes that most full-wrap prints meet near the handle, advises against faces, intricate patterns or vertical lines right at the seam, and says tiny shifts are most noticeable there. Neither page gives a measurement for the zone. The handle zone works like a safe area, and its size comes from the template, which belongs to the platform and the mug. A design with the focal point at the template edge puts it behind the handle on the first mug off the line.
In practice: Mug and tumbler template sizes, DPI and seam: Wrap seam, handle zone and left- or right-handed use.

Terms beginning with Z

ZDHC MRSL manufacturing restricted substances list from the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals programme: A list of substances restricted from intentional use in textile, leather and footwear manufacturing, with limits per substance, aimed at the chemical inputs rather than at the finished garment. The sharpest fact on this beat is that ZDHC runs no certification scheme at all. Its own MRSL page says that rather than creating its own certification standard it recognises the ones already in the market, by awarding ZDHC Approved status to third-party certifiers, and what those certifiers produce is a conformance level for a chemical formulation, recorded in the ZDHC Gateway: level 0 is a supplier declaration, level 1 a third-party document or test review, level 2 a review of the supplier’s product stewardship, level 3 a site visit. ZDHC issues no certificate of its own, so “ZDHC certified” names nothing when it is said about a factory or a garment. On a bottle of ink it is loose shorthand for something narrower: a ZDHC Approved certifier certifies the chemical formulation to a conformance level, and that level is what the Gateway ranks. Pretreatment and ink vendors quote ZDHC loosely because the phrase sells, and the loose version travels straight into shop product pages. The question that gets a real answer is which conformance level, for which product code, on which Gateway record.
Zone pricing / zone skipping distance bands on a carrier's rate card, and paying to start past some of them: Domestic parcel rates are banded by distance rather than charged by the mile: the carrier reads a zone off a chart using origin and destination, and the same weight costs more as the band climbs. USPS takes the band from the first three digits of the destination ZIP code (USPS Domestic Zone Chart). Zone skipping is the shipper doing part of the line-haul itself: palletising a pre-sorted load, trucking it near the customers, and handing it over there so the carrier only bills the short leg. USPS sells those entry points as Parcel Select destination entry, priced at the sectional center facility, the destination hub, or the delivery unit itself (DMM 253). It needs steady volume into one region, which a print-to-order factory rarely has, so the POD version of the same idea is choosing where to print rather than where to inject: a second production site near the customers moves the zone before the parcel exists.

# Terms beginning with a number

A Terms beginning with A

B Terms beginning with B

C Terms beginning with C

D Terms beginning with D

E Terms beginning with E

F Terms beginning with F

G Terms beginning with G

H Terms beginning with H

I Terms beginning with I

J Terms beginning with J

K Terms beginning with K

L Terms beginning with L

M Terms beginning with M

N Terms beginning with N

O Terms beginning with O

P Terms beginning with P

R Terms beginning with R

S Terms beginning with S

T Terms beginning with T

U Terms beginning with U

V Terms beginning with V

W Terms beginning with W

Z Terms beginning with Z

Terms beginning with a number

Terms beginning with A

Terms beginning with B

Terms beginning with C

Terms beginning with D

Terms beginning with E

Terms beginning with F

Terms beginning with G

Terms beginning with H

Terms beginning with I

Terms beginning with J

Terms beginning with K

Terms beginning with L

Terms beginning with M

Terms beginning with N

Terms beginning with O

Terms beginning with P

Terms beginning with R

Terms beginning with S

Terms beginning with T

Terms beginning with U

Terms beginning with V

Terms beginning with W

Terms beginning with Z