Different Lanuages – PrintWiki to the Rescue

Every industry has its own unique jargon. “In the weeds”, “OS&E”, “mis en place”, “front of the house”, and “sideboard” are all unique to the restaurant industry with all the trimmings of the quirky, Bourdain-esque culture. The IT staff we often love to hate speak in terms of “ASCII”, “XML”, “codec”, “cookies”, “denial of service”, and “proof of concept.” The military, the medical field, insurance industry, realtors, even drug addicts all use a very specific lingo, code, and handshakes to get their points across to others in the same field.

The graphic arts community is no exception. The difficulty arises when one of two things happen – a new term is coined or existing terminology is not used consistently between everyone in the field. Let’s examine one of the most common terms within conventional printing – sheetwise. This term is used to explain a sheet of paper printed on one side, then flipped over, and ran through a second time on the press to print the second side of the paper. Sheetwise is not, however, the holy grail term used for this type of printing. Many shops also call this Work-and-Back. This is confusing for those of us within the industry and impossible for those outside of printing.

image on Creativepro.com

There is a resource, that has been available for almost three years, called PrintWiki. It is the Wikipedia of printing terminology created by Adam Dewitz and backed by WhatTheyThink.com. As with Wikipedia, anyone who can offer an opinion, critique, or provide new information, can post to and update the website. Unfortunately, the site has seen little promotion or fanfare since it’s original launch in November of 2006.

PrintWiki strives to provide a comprehensive, open-source knowledge base of information on the printing and graphic communication industry.

What are you waiting for? Go tweet, e-mail, blog, and spread the word
about this invaluable resource! A link to PrintWiki should be on every
printer’s website, either the front page or the “how-to” page! After all, this kind of effort that should get industry wide support from industry suppliers to the individuals.