guillotine
A guillotine is the machine a printing works cuts its sheets on: one long blade, brought down on a whole stack at once.
In more detail
A stack of sheets is squeezed flat under a heavy bar, and the blade comes down through the lot in one stroke. Hundreds of sheets are cut on one setting, which is the whole reason printing in quantity is worth doing: the cutting costs the same for five sheets or five hundred.
It is also why one setting decides an entire run. The operator lines the cut up against short marks printed in the margin, and every sheet under the bar is cut where those marks say.
What it does on a real document
The file draws those marks itself, at the four corners, out in the margin that gets thrown away. It also states the finished rectangle, so a machine that cuts by numbers rather than by eye can read the line straight out of the document.
A file whose page is already the finished size gives the operator nothing to line up on and no colour to cut into. That is the job that stops on arrival.
Where it comes from, and why
The name and the shape come from the machine of the French Revolution, and the paper trade borrowed both in the eighteen hundreds. Before it, sheets were cut a few at a time with a knife against a straight edge, and a run of any size took a day.
See it on a finished document
A sheet as it goes to the press A sheet of shelf labels The rules behind this word, and the texts they are read from
Glossary
- blade
- The knife that cuts a printed sheet down to the finished page. It comes down on a whole stack at once, so it lands within a fraction of a millimetre of the line rather than on it — which is the reason a page printed to its edge is drawn larger than it will be.