PUBLISHING

several hundred or thousand copies, but
in individual copies ‘on demand’ based on
a single customer’s order. The emergence
of POD has had a significant impact on
the publishing industry, as it allowed authors
for the first time to self-publish at a
very low cost. Print-on-demand is sometimes
also called publishing on demand.
Program
The terms program, software, application
and app are often used more or
less interchangeably. A program tells a
computer or mobile device what to do.
Programs are usually written in ‘high-level’
programming languages (such as C,
C++, Java, Python) which are a mixture
of English-language commands and
mathematical-logical expressions. See
also Software.
Protocol
In computing and networking, a protocol
is a technical standard according to which
two systems communicate with each
other. For example, the HTTP protocol
defines the format for communication between
web browsers and web servers. (Or,
to use an ‘old media’ example: frequency
modulation (FM) is the technical protocol
for most radio transmissions.)
R
Reflowable
A reflowable document is a document
without a predefined page layout, in
which the page dimensions are dynamically
and automatically adapted (including
page breaks) to each screen size
and screen aspect ratio. This means, for
example, that an ebook may appear as 50
A5-size pages on a tablet, but as 100 A6-
size pages on an e-reader. This also means
that the designer no longer has control of
the final page layout. The concept is also
known as ‘responsive design’.
Resolution
The smaller a pixel, the higher the visual
resolution of any display. Resolution is
commonly expressed as the number of
dots per square inch (dpi) of a printed output
or display. For digital print the industry
standard is 300-600 dpi, for offset print
600-1200 dpi. Electronic screens traditionally
had resolutions of 72-100 dpi, but
the most recent generations of tablets and
smartphones feature screen resolutions of
300-600 dpi. See also Pixel.
RTF
Acronym for Rich Text Format. A document
format established in 1987 as an
alternative format for Microsoft Word
documents. Contrary to common belief,
RTF is not an open standard and does not
solve compatibility problems between
word processing formats.
S
Server-side scripting
Server-side scripting means that, rather
than transferring a previously defined
web page from a web server to a web
browser, the page (or part of the page) is
instead dynamically generated by software
running on the server. All content management
systems are based on server-side
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