What are the differences between Reaper Inks and Liners? 

This is from Anne Foerester off of the Reaper Fora:

Or, for those who don't mind repeating themselves, with a bit more depth...because why say it in twenty words when I can use a couple hundred?

Our inks are dyes suspended in a clear acrylic lacquer base.

Our liners are pigments suspended in a black-tinted acrylic enamel base.

Dyes are fully-soluble (meaning that they will dissolve completely in a solution) and will often re-activate when moisture is added even to a dried product (thus the "bleed" effects when paint is applied over some inks). Pigments stay particulate in solution, though the particles ground by today's high-end machinery are too fine for the human eye to discern. This means no bleed, and since there are particles of various sizes involved it also means varying degrees of coverage.

Both acrylic lacquers and acrylic enamels are known for their toughness. Lacquer is usually seen as a sealer and enamel as a coating. Enamels are more fluid and transparent than most paint bases. Thus, the liners are more fluid than other paints (extra flow improver added to the mix further aids this). The innate translucency in the acrylic enamel base is what makes the liners great for shading/glazing/washing/underpaintig.

And further... 

Reaper Inks have flow improver added. And we try to thin them a little more so that they aren't thick goo out of the bottle. They are suspended in a water-based acrylic lacquer. Unfortunately, even during my time working for GW I was never involved in their paint formulation (they outsourced it rather than doing it in-house like Reaper does) so I can't tell you what their suspension is for comparison.  I know that back in the day I did have to add flow improver and a ton of water to get their stuff to where I wanted it, which is one of the reasons we decided to add flow improver to the MSP inks. GW does have a few more ink colors than we do, and generally our colors are darker as well (at least in MSP's) because the MSP ink colors were chosen to be useful for shading rather than glazing for intensifying colors. The reason for this is that we already had color-intensifiers in the Clear Bright paints.

For the record, the MSP Liner colors are paints rather than inks. They use a different, more fluid base than the rest of the line, and have extra flow improver added, so they do behave somewhat like a cross between ink and paint.

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