platen

n 1: the bed of a machine tool to which the work is clamped

2: the flat plate of a printing press that presses the paper

against the type

3: the roller on a typewriter against which the keys strike

flatten

To remove structural information, especially to filter

something with an implicit tree structure into a simple

sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to

{flat ASCII}. "This code flattens an expression with

parentheses into an equivalent {canonical} form."

[{Jargon File}]