PawPrint.net Glossary of Terms

Used in conjunction with the Internet Protocol (IP) to transmit information over the Internet in the form of units.

While IP takes care of handling the actual delivery of the data, TCP takes care of keeping track of the packets that a message is divided into for efficient routing through the Internet. For example, when a web page is downloaded from a web server, the TCP program layer in that server divides the file into packets, numbers the packets, and then forwards them individually to the ...

RAM is a type of computer storage whose contents can be accessed in any order. This is in contrast to sequential memory devices such as magnetic tapes, discs and drums, in which the mechanical movement of the storage medium forces the computer to access data in a fixed order. It is usually implied that RAM can be both written to and read from, in contrast to read-only memory or ROM.

Computers use RAM to hold the program code and data during execution. In the first electronic computers, RAM wa...

A Page Description Language (PDL) developed by Adobe Systems. PostScript is primarily a language for printing documents on laser printers, but it can be adapted to produce images on other types of devices. PostScript is the standard for desktop publishing because it is supported by imagesetters, the very high-resolution printers used by service bureaus to produce camera-ready copy.

PostScript is an object-oriented language, meaning that it treats images, including fonts, as collections of ge...

ls [options] [names]

List the contents of a directory or directories. This is similar to the dos command ´dir´ frequently abbreviated in many shells to ll for ls -l which lists files with long format. If no [names] then the contents of the current directory are listed.

Options
-1, --format=single-column
Print one entry per line of output.

-a
List all files, including the normally hidden files whose names begin with a period.

-b, --escape
Display nonprinting characters in octal an...

An image format that records pixel information using the additive colour model of combining amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to create a wide gamut of colours. This is based on the way standard web offset printing (SWOP) inks are combines on a press to create most printed colour documents.

In Graphic design when the final goal is to send something for SWOP printing it is oftin a good idea to work in CMYK as opposed to RGB to ensure a better colour match and to avoid problems when c...

A protocol developed to enable the transfer of files across a network. It provides a reletively insecure username and password  security but has been more recently enhanced to allow for SSL encryption to provide a secure password exchange.

To some extent the use of FTP has been superceeded by SFTP (a component of SSH) or the secure file transfer protocol.