typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other ...

, a slug is any of several kinds of piece of

lead Lead () is a chemical element; it has Chemical symbol, symbol Pb (from Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a Heavy metal (elements), heavy metal that is density, denser than most common materials. Lead is Mohs scale, soft and Ductility, malleabl ...

or other

type metal In printing, type metal refers to the metal alloys used in traditional Movable type, typefounding and hot metal typesetting. Historically, type metal was an alloy of lead, tin and antimony in different proportions depending on the application, b ...

. One kind of slug is a piece of spacing material used to space paragraphs. In the era of commercial typesetting in metal type, they were usually manufactured in strips of 6- point lead. Another kind of slug is a single sort, bearing a single letter or any other symbol. More recently, a slug can be an entire line of Linotype typeset matter, where a single piece of lead has been cast bearing a line of text. In modern typesetting programs such as

Adobe InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application software, application produced by Adobe Inc., Adobe and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, ...

, slugs hold printing information, customized color bar information, or display other instructions and descriptions for other information in the document. Objects (including text frames) positioned in the slug area are printed but will disappear when the document is trimmed to its final page size. Slugs, or slug lines, are also the name for incidental typeset lines of type that are intended either for the printer's or binder's benefit (such as a collation mark, a catch line, or a galley slug) or as advertising for the producer of the printed piece (such as a line of type showing the name of the printer, the printer's item number or job number, and the telephone number of the printer in order to make reorders simple).

Usage in web publishing

This term is also used in web publishing to refer to short article labels that may be used as part of a

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

. Slugs are usually derived from an article's title and are limited in length, and to a specific set of characters (to prevent

percent-encoding URL encoding, officially known as percent-encoding, is a method to binary-to-text encoding, encode arbitrary data in a uniform resource identifier (URI) using only the ASCII, US-ASCII characters legal within a URI. Although it is known as ''URL en ...

); often only letters, numbers, and hyphens are allowed.

Usage in web publishing

References

See also