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.