four-colour glossies

1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly contains

technical specs but which is in fact as superficial as

possible without being totally content-free. "Forget the

four-colour glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often

applied as an indication of superficiality even when the

material is printed on ordinary paper in black and white.

Four-colour-glossy manuals are *never* useful for finding a

problem.

2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't

contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't

produce the expected or desired output.