Descender: in typography, the part
of the letterform that dips below the baseline; usually
refers to lowercase letters and some punctuation,
but some typefaces have uppercase letters with descenders.
Desktop: The layer in a drawing
where you can experiment and create objects for
future use. This layer is outside the borders of
the drawing page. You can drag objects from the
desktop layer to the drawing page when you decide
to use them.
Dingbat typeface: a typeface made
up of nonalphabetic marker characters, such as arrows,
asterisks, encircled numbers.
Data Exchange File (.dxf files):
format is a tagged data representation of the information
contained in an AutoCAD drawing file. The DXF file
format is a native file format of AutoCAD. It has
become a standard for exchanging CAD drawings and
is supported by many CAD applications. DXF format
is vector based and supports up to 256 colors.
Discretionary hyphen: a hyphen
that will occur only if the word appears at the
end of a line, not if the word appears in the middle
of a line.
Dithering: Changing images to
the Paletted color mode lets you use dithering to
enhance color information. Dithering places pixels
with specific colors or values relative to other
pixels of a specific color. The relationship of
one colored pixel to another creates the appearance
of additional colors that do not exist in the color
palette.
You can use two types of dithering: ordered dithering
and error diffusion. Ordered dithering approximates
color blends using fixed dot patterns; as a result,
solid colors are emphasized and edges appear harder.
Error diffusion scatters pixels irregularly, making
edges and colors softer. Jarvis, Stucki, and Floyd-Steinberg
are conversion options that provide error diffusion.
Diacritical mark: An accent mark
above, below, or through a written character; for
example, the acute (') and grave (`) accents
Display type: large and/or decorative
type used for headlines and as graphic elements
in display pieces. Common sizes are 14, 18, 24,
30, 36, 48, 60, and 72 point.
Dither: for digital halftones,
the creation of a flat bitmap by simply rutning
dots off or on. All dots are the same size there
are simply more of them in dark areas and fewer
of them in light areas -- as opposed to deep bitmaps
used in gray-scale images.
Dimension line: A line that displays
the size of objects or the distance or angle between
objects
DPI (dots per inch): the unit of
measurement used to describe the resolution of printed
output. The most common desktop laser printers output
a 300 dpi. Medium-resolution printers output at
600 dpi. Image setters output at 1270-2540 dpi.
Duotone: a halftone image printed
with two colors, one dark and the other light. The
same photograph is halftoned twice, using the same
screen at two different angles combining the two
improves the detail and contrast.
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