PUBLISHING

E-paper
Electronic paper, a display technology
designed to resemble printed paper rather
than the LCD displays used on most other
computing devices. E-paper consists of a
grid of tiny electronic ‘ink’ particles that
can be switched from black to white.
Electricity is only needed for refreshing
(‘turning’) the page; for the display itself,
no electricity or battery power is needed.
Since it is not backlit like an LCD, the
display must be illuminated externally like
conventional paper; the upside is that it
can be read in broad daylight without any
loss of image quality. Since the refresh
rate is much slower than LCD screens, the
technology does not allow for videos or
animations. See also LCD.
E-reader
A device capable of displaying digital texts
in various formats, notably EPUB, or in the
case of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers, Amazon’s
own proprietary formats AZW, KF8
and MOBI. Many e-readers also support
PDF and other formats.
F
File
A file is an object containing data and
metadata, and stored on a computer,
server or mobile device. A file can contain
a text, an image, a video, a software program,
etc. On most computer systems, files
are organized within hierarchies of folders.
Filename extension
A filename extension typically consists
of three or four letters at the end of a
filename, preceded by a dot (such as:
.html, .mp4, .jpg/.jpeg, etc.). Filename
extensions are used by many operating
systems including Windows and Mac OS X
to indicate the type of a file.
Folder
On most operating systems, files are
grouped and hierarchically organized in
folders. The term ‘folder’ is used synonymously
with ‘directory’. Folders can be
hierarchically organized in a tree-like
structure, so that one folder contains a
number of other folders, each of which
may contain yet more folders, etc. Subfolders
are sometimes referred to as ‘child
folders’ of the ‘parent folder’.
Formatting
The process of applying typographic
styling (bold, italic, etc.) to a text. Another
unrelated meaning of the same term is: to
erase and initialize a storage device (such
as a hard disk or memory card).
Freemium
A revenue model in which the basic product
or service (typically software, media,
games or web services) is provided free of
charge, but money (a premium) is charged
for extra features or virtual goods.
G
GitHub
A freemium web hosting service for
user-run Git repositories. Git, an Open
Source software application for collaborative
editing over the internet, is described
in our software catalogue.
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