Slug (typesetting)


In typesetting, a slug is any of several kinds of piece of lead or other type metal. 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 one line of Linotype typeset matter, where each line corresponds to one piece of lead. In modern typesetting programs such as Adobe InDesign, slugs hold printing information, customized color bar information, or display other instructions and descriptions for other information in the document. Objects positioned in the slug area are printed but will disappear when the document is trimmed to its final page size.

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. Slugs are usually derived from an article's title and are limited in length, and to a specific set of characters ; often only letters, numbers, and hyphens are allowed.