A Day in the Life
McCarthy thinks the answer is yes: "Fiber, furnish and finish—use these to determine your paper type."
She also noted that the key differentiating factor of an uncoated free sheet is opacity. She said that sometimes supplementing a heavier text stock for a cover stock can save money and lessen the weight for distribution, but it only works domestically. International printers and publishers have other concerns. Referring to European standards, McCarthy acknowledged, "They value surface and brightness so much that they'll jeopardize opacity." She explained that by paging through a European-printed publication, images are visible from the opposite pages because the sheets are significantly opaque. "If you're doing a job here and decide to send it overseas, you'll have to go up one basis weight to get the same opacity," she warned. "And when you come back, you can go down one basis weight."