G

Glyphs

Glyph is a term for describing the shape and style of a single type character. For example, an italic letter 'a' and a Roman letter 'a' are two different glyphs of the same character.

See also: Typography, Fonts

Greeking

definition 1

extend. Greeked text, dummy text
Greeking, from a typographic point of view, is the use of nonsense or dummy text, instead of the real body copy. This is done by designers to the give the page an overall grey, or flat appearance, so as not to distract from the design layout. The dummy, or nonsense text is often Latin, the most famous of these is known as 'lorem ipsum'.

Many graphic designers will tell of their exasperation at showing a mock-up proof of a design to a client or editorial team, only for them to spend hours discussing the random text that has been used to fill the space. The use of dummy text, such as lorem ipsum, avoids this irritation and allows the client to focus on the design itself.

See also: Lorem ipsum

definition 2

Page layout tools, such as QuarkXpress, have their own form of greeking. But this is less for design purposes, than to speed up the display of a layout on screen. Although less necessary these days with much faster computers, greeking an image or text used to save a long time when computers were dramatically slower. On occasion a large scan could take up to 10 minutes to redraw on the screen each time the layout was moved by the designer. As well as greeking text and images, InDesign and QuarkXpress, have now built in options to allow the designer to specify the quality of the image to be displayed. For general layout purposes a low resolution image may be fine. But designers now have the option to display a higher resolution image as well.

There are other times when greeking an on-screen image can come in useful. Occasionally an image can become corrupt. When this image shows up in a page layout application, it can cause the program to crash. Opening the document and greeking all images, allows the designer to scroll to where the image is displayed and to delete it.

See also: high resolution