Here is common terminology for design and printing projects:
Bleed is the part of a printed document that is outside the bounds of the final size of the piece. It is used to make sure images and other design elements print all the way to the edge of the paper.
CMYK or process colour, stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. These are colour that a printer will use to create all colours in a printed document. This colour scheme is different from what is used in the screen color space of Red, Green, Blue or RGB.
Copy generally refers to text -- typewritten pages, word-processing files, typeset galleys, or pages – although it sometimes refers to all source materials (text and graphics) used in a publication.
Crop marks horizontal and vertical lines that indicate where the printed piece will get trimmed.
DPI Stands for dots per inch. It is a measurement of the resolution of an image. For print-quality images, photos must be 300 DPI or higher (high-resolution). For images that will be used on screen, it should be no lower than 72 DPI. Powerpoint presentations use 96 DPI as the default resolution.
EPS stands for Encapsulated PostScript. An EPS file is usually in a vector format (see definition below), so it is easily editable and scalable. It is widely used to create graphics, logos and illustrations.*
Font is a set of characters in a specific typeface, at a specific point size, and in a specific style. "12-point Times Bold" is a font -- the typeface Times, at 12-point size, in the bold style. Hence "12-point Times Italic" and "10-point Times Bold" are separate fonts.
GIF is a file format used in web graphics and is best for images that are made of solid colors, like logos. GIFs support transparency and they can be animated. GIFs are also considered a lossless format – meaning they do not suffer compression over exchanges – as long as they do not exceed 256 colors.*
Four-color process The printing process that reproduces colors by combining, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. If you look through a magnifying glass, you'll see that the printed image consists of dots in these four colors. These dots are printed on top of each other, next to each other or just close to each other, depending on the color and tonal values wanted.
JPEG is an abbreviation for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the committee that created this file type. The file extension is .jpg. It is best used for photographs or images that have gradients. JPEGs do not support transparency, unlike GIF and PNG, and cannot be animated, unlike GIF.*
Raster or bitmap images are made up of pixels. Raster images are typically photos, but they can also be illustrations that have been turned from vectors into pixels. This doesn’t allow much manipulation and editing, and generally poses problems with scaling to larger sizes.
RGB or Red, Green and Blue are a monitor’s (or TV's) color space. RGB is considered an additive color space, meaning to make white you add all the colors together. You view the world in RBG, not CMYK. Images for Web and Powerpoint should be kept as RGB.
TIFF is the raster version of EPS. TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format and like EPS it is a common way to move files between raster programs like Photoshop, InDesign or Quark. It can be a lossless format if you choose the No Compression option, which is the default in Photoshop. TIFF supports percentages of opacity like PNG and is ideal for the final file type of pixel-based images for print. You can also have layers in the TIFF format, but this will increase the file size.
Vector can most readily be recognized as illustrations, particularly from programs like Illustrator or Freehand. But not all illustrations are necessarily vector-based. Vectors work by defining points and what fills the space between those points in a document and they are stored as mathematical formulas. Vector files (like Illustrator files) are fractions the size of raster files because there is less data needed to create the images. They can also be enlarged or shrunk to any size without any loss of quality contrarily to raster images. That is why they are the best format for submitting graphics like icons and logos.*