four-color glossies
four-color 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-color 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-color-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.