Soft copy

In information handling, the U.S. Federal Standard 1037C (Glossary of Telecommunication Terms) defines a hard copy is a permanent reproduction, or copy, in the form of a physical object, of any media suitable for direct use by a person (in particular paper), of displayed or transmitted data. Examples of hard copy include teleprinter pages, continuous printed tapes, computer printouts, and radio photo prints. On the other hand, physical objects such as magnetic tapes diskettes, or non-printed punched paper tapes are not defined as hard copy by 1037C.

A file which can be viewed on a screen without printing it out is sometimes called a soft copy. The U.S. Federal Standard 1037C defines "soft copy" as "a nonpermanent display image, for example, a cathode ray tube display."

The term "hard copy" predates the age of the digital computer. In the process of producing printed books and newspapers, hard copy refers to a manuscript or typewritten document that has been edited and proofread, and is ready for typesetting, or being read on-air in a radio or television broadcast. This traditional meaning has been all but forgotten in the wake of the information revolution.

The hacker's Jargon File defines a dead-tree version to be a paper version of an on-line document, where "dead trees" refer to paper. It is a dysphemism for hard copy. Variations include dead-tree format and dead-tree-ware.

A saying from the Jargon File is that "You can't grep dead trees", from the Unix command grep meaning to search the contents of text files. This means that an advantage of keeping documents in digital form rather than on paper is that they can be more easily searched for specific contents. A yet another usage of this imagery, cited in Jargon File is "tree-killer" , which may refer either to a printer or a person who wastes paper, for example marketing people who generate lots of "content-free" documentation.

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