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.
