In the book and publishing industry, “impress” is crucial: getting words or images onto paper (or other media) using mechanical or digital means.
The process starts with design and typesetting. One must choose precisely how it should look on the page, including font selection, spacing adjustments, proper alignment, and visually pleasing organization. Adding pictures, diagrams, or photographs may help people understand the context.
Once the design is complete, the following process involves impressing inked-up movable type onto paper using a letterpress. Today, there are many more ways to “impress.” Offset litho is still very common, as are digital printing methods, which don’t involve any physical plates! All these techniques result in transferring the ink from one place (a container, cylinder, etc.) onto paper—and how well this transfer happens affects things like legibility, visual impact, and general desirability.
On the other hand, “impress” in the context of electronic or digital books refers not just to making sure words and pictures appear correct electronically but also that somebody can access and read them without hassle, may it be on an e-reader device such as Amazon Kindle, an iPad, or even just on their computer monitor. An ebook is thus said to be ‘impressed’ into file formats such as PDFs (Portable Document Format files used by Adobe’s Acrobat software) or EPUBs (the file format used for most commercial ebooks). The idea behind these is that text and images should reflow themselves based on screen size and include more interactive features or multimedia elements, if desired, such as sound voices or video.
The term “impress” could also mean something more abstract: about making an impression upon the people who read your words—getting them to pay attention, get interested and excited—and then remembering what they’ve read afterward. This isn’t just about how it looks on the page—the quality of the content itself is very important, too – including things like the writing style, storytelling ability, and even general ‘conceptualization’ of a book or magazine idea.