DTP Glossary — 80 Desktop Publishing, InDesign & Translation Terms Explained

The alternative text engine inside InDesign that correctly composes Arabic, Hebrew, and other complex scripts. It's hidden in the Paragraph panel menu — without it, RTL text renders broken even when the right font is installed.

Pairing an existing source document with its existing translation, segment by segment, to build a translation memory from past work. Done with tools like LF Aligner or Trados alignment before a new project starts.

A short written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers. Required for every non-decorative image in an accessible PDF — and it must be written per language version, not copied from the source.

An image or frame attached to a specific point in the text so it travels with that text when the document reflows. Essential in translation work, where expansion pushes content across pages.

A purely decorative element — background image, rule, repeated page header — marked as an artifact in a tagged PDF so screen readers skip it instead of announcing visual noise.

An invisible horizontal grid that text sits on, keeping lines level across columns and facing pages. Often needs a larger increment in target languages whose scripts have taller glyphs or stacked diacritics.

Text mixing right-to-left and left-to-right content in one line — an Arabic sentence containing a Latin brand name, a number, or an email address. Needs correct direction handling or word order visually scrambles.

The zone extending beyond the trim edge (typically 3 mm) so colour and images still reach the page edge after cutting. Missing bleed is one of the most common preflight failures in supplied files.

The clickable navigation panel in a PDF, usually generated from the heading structure. Required for long accessible documents — and rebuilt per language version, since translated headings change.

Computer-Assisted Translation software — Trados Studio, memoQ, Phrase. It segments the text, applies translation memory, and exports the translated file (usually IDML) that lands on the DTP specialist's desk.

A named style applied to text within a paragraph — bold runs, inline code, links. Clean character styles survive the CAT round-trip intact; manual overrides come back as tag soup.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Dense scripts with their own line-breaking rules, no italic convention, and typically 10–30% text contraction from English — layouts gain space rather than lose it.

The four-ink colour model (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) used in offset and digital print. RGB images must be converted or colour-managed before print output, or colours shift on press.

Thin lines printed outside the page area showing the printer exactly where to trim. Added at PDF export, never drawn manually on the page.

Marks above or below letters — ç, ő, ấ, Arabic harakat. A font that lacks them silently substitutes or drops the marks, which is why checking glyph coverage comes before any layout work.

EU law in force since June 2025 requiring businesses to make digital documents and services accessible. The main legal driver behind PDF remediation demand across Europe.

The long (—) and medium (–) dashes. Conventions differ per language — German favours the en dash with spaces, English style guides split on the em dash — so dashes are checked, not carried over from the source.

The standard reflowable e-book format. Unlike a print PDF, text resizes and reflows to the reader's device — so it's a separate production job from the print layout, not an export afterthought.

InDesign's search-and-replace tool with text, GREP, glyph, and object modes. The workhorse for repetitive post-translation fixes — double spaces, wrong quotation marks, stray straight apostrophes — across a whole file in seconds.

What happens when a font lacks glyphs for the target language: the system swaps in a fallback font, or renders empty boxes (□) nicknamed "tofu". The most visible font failure after translation.

A manual line break (Shift+Enter) inside a paragraph. Used to "fix" line endings in the source, it lands mid-sentence inside CAT segments and survives translation in all the wrong places — a classic item on the pre-translation cleanup list.

A translation memory match below 100% that the translator edits rather than retranslates. A 100% match is identical; a context match is also confirmed by surrounding segments. Affects translation pricing — and explains why repeated content comes back perfectly consistent.

The set of characters a font actually contains. A typeface can look complete in English and still miss Vietnamese diacritics, Cyrillic, or Arabic entirely — the single biggest cause of font problems in multilingual DTP.

Pattern-based formatting applied automatically inside a paragraph style — for example, all digits set in a tabular figure font. Powerful, but patterns written for the source language must be re-checked after translation.

The settings controlling where words break and how spaces stretch in justified text. Strictly language-specific: German hyphenates differently from English, and Arabic doesn't hyphenate at all — it uses kashida instead.

A colour-definition file (e.g. ISO Coated v2) that keeps colour consistent from screen to proof to press. The wrong profile at export means the printed brochure won't match the approved PDF.

InDesign Markup Language — the XML-based exchange format that CAT tools can read and any InDesign version can open. The standard file to send for translation, and the format most per-page DTP rates are based on.

The native InDesign document format. CAT tools cannot open it, and older InDesign versions can't open newer INDD files — which is why IDML exists. Keep the INDD as the working master, exchange via IDML.

Markers inside CAT-tool segments that represent formatting — a bold run, an index marker, a style change. A messy source file produces "tag soup" that slows translators down and breaks formatting when tags get misplaced.

The elongation of Arabic letterforms used to justify text — the connecting strokes stretch instead of the word spaces. Handled by the World-Ready Composer; faking it with tracking looks immediately wrong to native readers.

Adjusting the space between specific letter pairs (To, AV) so spacing looks optically even. Distinct from tracking, which spaces a whole range uniformly.

Stacked organisational levels within a document. Some multilingual workflows keep one language per layer in a single file — workable for packaging and signage, painful for long documents.

The vertical space between lines of text, measured baseline to baseline. Scripts with tall glyph stacks — Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic with full vocalisation — usually need more leading than the Latin source.

Two or more letters combined into a single glyph — fi, fl in Latin type; thousands of obligatory letter combinations in Arabic, where ligatures aren't decoration but correct spelling.

Language-specific rules about where a line may end. Japanese kinsoku forbids certain characters at line starts; Thai has no spaces between words at all. Composer and language settings must match the target language.

The panel listing every placed image and asset with its status. Missing or modified links are the most common failure in handed-over files — and the first thing preflight checks.

A language plus a region — fr-FR vs fr-CA, pt-PT vs pt-BR. Affects spelling, date and number formats, currency, and which hyphenation dictionary InDesign should apply.

Template pages carrying repeating elements — headers, footers, page numbers. Keeping these on parents instead of overriding them per page is a core part of preparing a file for translation: one fix updates every page.

A space that keeps the words around it on the same line. Obligatory in French typography before ; : ! ? and inside guillemets — one of the most frequent corrections in French DTP, and invisible until a line breaks in the wrong place.

A named style for frames — stroke, fill, text inset, corner options. Keeps boxes, callouts, and captions identical across 20 language versions without manual checking.

The two modern font file formats. OpenType supports the large glyph sets and script features (contextual shaping, ligatures) that complex scripts require — one reason font choice decides multilingual success.

Text converted to vector shapes. It can't be edited, styled, or translated any more — and CAT tools see nothing. Never outline text in a file that's heading to translation; outline only final print artwork, if at all.

A setting that prints an ink on top of underlying inks instead of knocking them out. Wrong overprint settings cause classic press disasters — white text that vanishes entirely on the printed sheet.

Text that no longer fits its frame, flagged by a red plus sign. The number-one issue after translation into expanding languages — and invisible on a PDF proof unless you know how to find and fix it.

File → Package collects the document, every linked asset, and the used fonts into one folder for handoff. The difference between a usable delivery and a week of missing-file emails.

A named definition of paragraph-level formatting — font, size, leading, spacing, hyphenation. The backbone of a translation-ready file: named styles make multilingual fixes global instead of page-by-page.

The ISO standard (14289) for universally accessible PDFs — the technical benchmark that remediation work is validated against, typically with PAC and screen-reader testing.

The ISO standards family for print-ready PDF exchange — PDF/X-1a (flattened, CMYK-only) and PDF/X-4 (live transparency) being the ones printers actually ask for.

The CAT-tool step that automatically fills in translation memory matches before a human translator starts — so high-match repeat content arrives already translated and consistent.

The automated check for production errors — overset text, missing fonts and links, image resolution, colour issues. InDesign runs it live; custom profiles catch what the default Basic profile ignores.

The final exported PDF with bleed, marks, embedded fonts, and correct colour — ready for the press without any intervention by the printer. The standard end deliverable of a per-page DTP job.

Replacing source text with artificially expanded dummy text before the real translation, to test whether the layout survives expansion. Cheap insurance on large multi-language projects.

The automated verification CAT tools run before export — numbers, inline tags, terminology, empty or untranslated segments. A clean QA pass means fewer surprises when the file reaches DTP.

The sequence in which assistive technology reads a document's content. Visual order and logical order are not the same thing — setting it deliberately is a core remediation task, especially in multi-column layouts.

Fixing an existing PDF to meet accessibility standards: semantic tagging, reading order, alt text, table structure, document language. What it involves and why multilingual documents need it most.

The pixel density of placed images. 300 ppi at final printed size is the standard benchmark — an image that's 300 ppi at thumbnail size drops below it the moment it's scaled up.

A black built from all four inks for deep, even large solids. Body text stays 100% K only — rich black text causes registration fringing on press.

Scripts that read right to left — Arabic and Hebrew. The entire layout mirrors: margins, columns, image positions, binding side, reading direction. A different document setup, not a text swap.

Software — NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver — that reads documents aloud for blind and low-vision users. The real-world test of any accessibility work: if it reads wrong here, the tag tree is wrong.

How a CAT tool splits text into translatable units, normally at sentence boundaries. Bad source files — PDF conversions, manual line breaks mid-sentence — produce broken segments that translators have to fight.

The area outside the bleed used for job information, instructions, or sign-off notes. Discarded at trimming; included or excluded at PDF export.

The language translated from (source) and into (target). DTP works in the target file while constantly comparing against the source layout — the source PDF is part of every proper handoff.

A pre-mixed ink printed separately from CMYK for exact brand colours, metallics, or fluorescents. Unintended spot swatches in a file mean unexpected printing plates — and costs.

InDesign's plain-text editing view (Ctrl/Cmd+Y) that shows an entire story including text beyond the frame — the only way to see and edit overset text directly.

Manual formatting applied on top of a named style, flagged with a + in the Styles panel. Each override is a little landmine: it travels through translation as an extra inline tag and breaks the one-fix-updates-everything logic of styles.

Named styles controlling table structure and cell formatting. Without them, translated tables collapse into manual repair work — the six failure modes and the fix order.

A TOC generated from paragraph styles rather than typed manually. After translation it rebuilds — correct titles, correct page numbers — in one click, provided the style architecture is clean.

The hidden structural layer of a tagged PDF defining what each element is — H1, paragraph, list, table — for assistive technology. Building and repairing it is the heart of remediation.

A database of approved terminology that CAT tools check against during translation — the reason your product names and legal phrasing stay identical across 20 languages.

Translated text running longer than the source — up to 35% in German, 25% in French from English, while CJK languages contract. The expansion rates by language and how to design for them.

The container that holds text. Everything about fit, flow, and overset starts here — frame size, inset, auto-size options, and vertical justification all decide how a translation behaves.

Linking text frames so a story flows from one to the next. Unthreaded, fragmented frames are a top pre-translation problem: they break sentences into separate CAT segments.

Uniform letter-spacing applied across a range of text. A legitimate micro-fix for a line that almost fits — and an instantly visible mistake when overused to force translated text into a frame.

A database of previously translated segment pairs that CAT tools reuse. The agency's accumulating asset: the more you translate, the less each future project costs.

The final page size after cutting — what "A4" or "6×9 inch" refers to. Everything outside it (bleed, slug, marks) exists only for production.

Traditional top-to-bottom, right-to-left text setting used in Japanese and Chinese publishing. Requires vertical text frames and composer support — not a rotation of horizontal text.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Level AA is the standard written into most contracts and laws — and it applies to PDFs as well as websites, which is where document remediation comes in.

A lone line stranded at the top of a column (widow) or the bottom (orphan). Keep-options control them automatically — but every language version reflows differently, so they're re-checked per language.

Determining where word boundaries fall in scripts written without spaces — Thai, Khmer, Lao, Japanese. Correct line breaking depends on dictionary-based composition, not the space key.

XML Localisation Interchange File Format — the bilingual exchange format CAT tools use internally and between systems. Your IDML travels through translation wrapped in XLIFF before coming back as a translated IDML.