four-color glossies

n.

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 solving 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.