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Last revised: 2005-05-16 by Alan Hogan. See all.
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One of the purposes of our club and website is to help people learn about technology and help them with computer-related problems. One way we’d like to do that is by making this question-and-answer forum available for you. Please ask us anything on your mind using the form below, and we will post the answer here!
Past Questions and Answers
- Why, when they talk about printer inks, is black
represented by “K” in CMYK?
—Ben Heald - Most printers use four inks: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and
BlacK. These four inks are often abbreviated as “CMYK”.
There seem to be two reasons why they don’t use
“B” instead of “K”. First, it
can stand for Key, because black ink is often
used as a reference to register the other colors.
(No, that doesn't make much sense to me, either.)
The second reason is that it just stands for “blacK”, and
they didn’t want to use “B”
so as to avoid confusion with the “B” in
“RGB”, which stands for Red, Green and Blue and
is the set of colors used on screens as opposed to
printers.
—Alan Hogan
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