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 a single sort, bearing a single letter or any other symbol. More recently, a slug can be an entire line of Linotype typeset matter, where a single piece of lead has been cast bearing a line of text.
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.
Slugs, or slug lines, are also the name for incidental typeset lines of type that are intended either for the printer's or binder's benefit or as advertising for the producer of the printed piece.