In
typesetting, a
slug is a piece of
lead or other
type metal, in any of several specific
word senses. In one sense, a 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. In another sense, a 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 displays other instructions and descriptions for other information in the document. Objects (including text frames) positioned in the slug area are printed but will disappear when the document is trimmed to its final page size.