Lamp

Source of illumination in a scanner. In a flatbed, it travels along on the carriage. Scanner lamps are usually fluorescent or cold-cathode.

Landscape

An image or printout that is positioned with the horizontal plane longer than the vertical.

Laser Printer

Printer that uses a focused laser beam and mirror to draw an image on a light sensitive drum. The image on the drum is electrostatically charged to attract toner and then a similarly charged piece of paper passes beneath the drum and pulls the toner from the drum onto itself in form of the image. Heat fuses the toner to the page and the paper is discharged before being dispensed. Laser printers are expensive, but they produce photographic quality images.

Lasso

Image editing tool used to select areas of an image for moving or cropping. See cropping and mask.

Legal-size

Common name for paper measuring 8.5" by 14". Commonly used for legal or important documents.

Letter-size

Common name for paper measuring 8.5" by 11". The most common printing size.

Line Art

1. Single-bit bitmap graphic consisting of only the colors black and white. Commonly used for documents and drawings. 2. Setting on a scanner interface for scanning documents in line art mode. 3. A black and white document or drawing that has been scanned in line art mode.

Lossy

Term used to describe data compression that discards, i.e. loses, data in a graphic file to conserve file size.

LPI

Acronym for Lines Per Inch. Frequency of horizontal and vertical lines in a printed halftone screen as found in newspapers and magazines. There are generally 55 to 200 LPI in a halftone screen.