printing
printing Technique for multiple reproduction of images, such as text and pictures. In ancient China and Japan, carved wooden blocks were inked to print pictures. From the 10th century, the Chinese used separate pieces of type, so that each page could be printed from arrangements of standard characters. Metal type, made by casting, first appeared in Korea in c.1403. In Europe, Gutenberg and Caxton developed the use of letterpress in the 1400s. Printing expanded rapidly in the 1700s and 1800s. Lithography enabled printers to produce impressive colour prints. For text, stereotype printing plates were cast from the pages of type, so that the type could be re-used for setting other pages. Typesetting machines speeded up the process of setting up pages. The invention of photography in the 1820s led to the development of new techniques for reproducing photographs in print, such as the halftone process. More recently, production speeds greatly increased with the application of photosetting, in which the type is set photographically on sheet film, and offset printing. Today, many publications are produced using a word processor to enter the text. Desktop publishing (DTP) programs allow images of the text and pictures to be arranged on screen. The computer data is postcripted for each page, and the postscripted files transferred directly to printing plates.
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printing