Diagraph PA/4000, Service Manual, Page: 137 / 213

PA/4000 GLOSSARY
acronym—Word formed from the first letter or letters of the words in a name, a term,
or phrase. Well-known acronyms include scuba (self-contained under-water
breathing apparatus) and sonar (sound navigation ranging).
alignment—1) Text alignment defines how text is aligned within the left and the right
indent paragraph: either flush left, flush right, centered, or justified; 2) Graphic
alignment defines how objects align along their sides, centers, tops or bottoms.
alphanumeric—Contraction of the words alphabetic and numeric. A set of
alphanumeric characters usually containing letters, numbers, punctuation marks
and symbols.
ANSI—Abbreviation for the American National Standards Institute, the US
government organization responsible for the development and promulgation of
data processing standards. It is USA’s member body to the International
Standards Organization.
ASCII—(ASK-key) Acronym for American Standard Code for Information
Interchange: the character set and code described by the American National
Standard Code for Information Interchange, a standard for representing characters
as binary numbers.
ASCII text file—Unformatted files that contain readable ASCII characters. If they
contain commands and arguments, they will probably end in a .BAT or .CMD
extension. If the files contain data, they will probably end in .TXT or .DAT
extensions.
aspect ratio—The proportional measurement of image size in terms of horizontal
length versus vertical height. For example, an image with an aspect ratio of 4:3 has
a horizontal length that is 4/3 the vertical height.
AUTOEXEC.BAT—File that is executed by the computer as soon as the boot process
is completed. This type of file is used in building a turnkey application that
requires very little input from a user before starting.
Auto-Retract—Feature of the PA/4000 that causes the tamp cylinder to return to the
home position when it encounters resistance. background—In bar codes, the
lighter portion of the printed code which includes the quiet zones.
bar—Darker element of a printed bar code. It can be either wide or narrow.
bar code—An array of parallel rectangular bars and spaces in a predetermined
pattern that represents data elements or characters.
bar code character—A group of bars and spaces that represent a number, letter or
symbol.
bar code density—The number of characters which can be represented in a linear
inch. Bar code densities are expressed in characters per inch.
bar code reader—Device used to scan bar code symbols.
bar height—Dimension of the bar measured perpendicular to the bar width.
bar width—Edge-to-edge measurement across a bar in a bar code.
baseline—The line on which both capital and lower case letters stand.