Dictionary:
print·ing (prĭn'tĭng)  |
| Sci-Tech Encyclopedia: Printing |
A process in which an image is reproduced on a surface, such as paper. There are five general classes of printing processes: relief printing, which includes letterpress and flexography; planographic printing, which includes offset lithography, screenless lithography, collotype, and waterless printing; intaglio, which includes gravure, steel-die, and copper-plate engraving; stencil and screen printing; and electronic printing, which includes electrostatic, magnetographic, ion or electron deposition, and ink-jet printing.
In relief printing, the printing element consists of a raised surface of type, lines, and dots that are inked. Printing is done by transferring the ink directly from the image surface to the paper. The nonprinting areas are below the printing surface.
In planographic printing, the printing areas of the plate are on the same plane as the nonprinting areas. Lithographic printing is accomplished by using the principle that grease and water do not mix. Early lithography was done by using a grease crayon or greasy ink to draw letters, symbols, and pictures in reverse on a porous stone. The surface of the stone was then sponged with a solution of gum arabic in water to render the nonprinting portions receptive to moisture but repellent to greasy ink, and the printing portions receptive to grease and repellent to moisture. This process is still used as a fine-arts medium for making lithographic prints from drawings or lettering done manually on the stone and printed on a handpress.
Commercial lithography uses thin metal plates made photomechanically or digitally and mounted on a press that has means for inking and dampening the plates and prints indirectly by a method commonly known as offset. The inked image on the plate is first transferred to an intermediate rubber-covered blanket cylinder, which then transfers the image to the paper. Relief and intaglio printing can also be printed by the offset principle. Because almost all lithography is printed by the offset principle, the term offset has become synonymous with lithography. Another planographic process is waterless printing, which uses temperature-controlled offset lithographic presses and special silicone-coated plates that can be printed without dampening. Collotype and screenless printing are planographic processes that print illustrations without the need of halftone images.
Intaglio printing, also known as gravure printing, is accomplished by cutting or engraving and etching various sizes or depths of minute cells (or wells) below the surface of a plate or cylinder to form the images. The cells are flooded and loaded with ink, the excess ink is scraped off the surface of the plate by a doctor blade, and the ink left in the cells is transferred to the substrate. The depth and size of each cell determine the amount of ink that is transferred to the printed surface. The nature of the process permits a heavy laydown of ink, which accounts for the rich, saturated colors typical of the gravure process.
In stencil and screen printing, also known as porous printing, ink is brushed or squeezed through a stencil image on a fine screen onto paper or other surface such as metal, glass, or textile. The screen holds the image area, which may carry either pictorial or typographic material. Although this process accounts for a comparatively small part of the total volume of printing, mechanization has made it more useful commercially. Because of the heavy laydown of ink, strong colors can be obtained by this process, making it suitable for posters and signs as well as fine art.
Conventional printing processes use printing plates and presses to produce quantities of the same image. Electronic printing processes use digital imaging systems that produce an image in each cycle of the imaging device. The images can be the same or can be changed from cycle to cycle. Electronic printing is especially suited to printed products requiring variable information such as utility bills, personalized mail, insurance policies, and customized books.
Electrostatic or electrophotographic printing is similar to photocopying. The processes use a photoconductor that is charged, exposed by lasers, and imaged with dry powder or liquid toners. They are used extensively for on-demand printing. Color electrophotographic printing systems are used for short-run variable and on-demand printing. Magnetographic printing is similar to electrophotographic printing except that magnetic toners are used. It is used for single- and spot-color short-run and on-demand printing.
In ion or electron deposition printing, a latent image is formed by ions or electrons on a heated dielectric coated cylinder, toned with a magnetic toner, and transferred and fixed to paper under pressure. The system is used for on-demand variable short-run single- or spot-color printing.
Ink-jet printing uses jets of ink droplets controlled by computer signals to print variable information. It is used extensively in packaging, and in mailing and distribution of magazines and catalogs. Color ink-jet is used for color proofing and short-run printed displays and billboards.
All the individual printing processes use a sequence of procedures. There are two types of processes in use: plate and plateless. The plate processes are the conventional printing processes—letterpress, flexography, lithography, gravure, screen printing, and others—which use a plate or other type of image carrier such as a cylinder or screen, and a printing press on which the image carrier is mounted, ink is applied, and the image is transferred to paper or other substrate. The plateless processes are the electronic or digital printing processes—electrophotographic, magnetographic, ion or electron deposition, and ink-jet—in which the images are produced digitally by lasers or other devices using special toners or inks.
The sequence of steps in both processes is prepress, press or print, and postpress. The prepress and postpress operations are similar for both processes: that is, the design, preparation, and assembly of images for reproduction, the finishing operations to give the final product such as a leaflet, book, or package, and their distribution, are essentially the same. The two differ in the means used to convert the imaging information into the imaged page, sheet, or board that must be converted to the final printed product for distribution.
The prepress operations for the conventional plate processes have consisted of typesetting, layout and design, process photography, image assembly, and platemaking. These were traditionally manual, labor-intensive operations, but electronics and computers have gradually replaced many manual operations. Phototypesetting and electronic scanning were the first computerized systems to replace manual operations. These were followed by other digital systems. The phototypesetter became the imagesetter. Page layout was accomplished by computer software programs. The scanner was enhanced by color electronic prepress systems. Personal computers developed into desktop publishing systems that emulated color electronic prepress systems, and imagesetters produced films for platemaking.
The conventional printing systems require plates. These plates are traditionally made from photographic negatives or positives. The availability of imagesetters that could produce the films for plates spurred the development of high-speed printing plates that could be exposed by lasers directly in the imagesetter. Also, the introduction of high-speed imagesetters with large memory capacity encouraged the development of digital printing systems that give printed products directly without the use of printing plates or presses.
Each conventional printing process has specific requirements for its printing plates or image carriers. The printing press unit has a cylinder for mounting the plate; an inking system to feed ink to the plate; and on an offset lithographic press, a cylinder covered with a rubber blanket to which the image is transferred from the plate and which transfers the image to the paper feeding over an impression cylinder. The press has a means for feeding paper or other substrate into the printing units, and a delivery device for collecting the printed sheets. The press has as many printing units as the number of colors that it can print (a four-color press has four printing units).
Digital printing uses different printing engines, depending on the process. Electrophotographic printing systems are like high-speed copiers, with a photoconductor-coated cylinder, means for charging the photoconductor, a device for laser exposure of the image on the photoconductor, and means for toning and fixing the image on the substrate. Ink-jet printing systems use an engine for ejecting selected droplets of dyed inks through small orifices in glass or stainless steel nozzles onto paper or other substrate.
After the sheets are printed, most must be put through some finishing operations to make a functional product. Sheets for books or booklets must be folded, collated, bound into covers, and stacked. They must also be prepared for distribution to the customer.
| Thesaurus: printing |
noun
| Music Encyclopedia: Printing |
The printing of music, because it involves a variety of symbols, some of which need to be presented as if superimposed, developed more slowly than the printing of literary material. The earliest printed music came in liturgical books, in the 1470s; most early examples show staff lines in red with notes printed in black. These were produced by two impressions from blocks of wood (or occasionally metal) cut in relief. The use of wood or metal blocks continued in the early 16th century, and was occasionally used much later, even into the 19th century. The first music to be printed in America, the Bay Psalm Book (Boston,1698) was printed from woodblocks.
In 1501 Ottaviano Petrucci, working in Venice, printed the first mensural music. His Harmonice musices odhecaton A, 96 pieces for three or four voices, was printed from movable type. His printing method involved three (later two) impressions, for the staves, for the notes and for the text. The first music printed by single impression was a short item produced by John Rastell in London, c 1526, but it was Pierre Attaingnant of Paris, publisher of many books of chansons from 1527-8 onwards, who set the example in single-impression printing. The single-impression process involved casting each note, its stem and a fragment from the staff-lines on the same unit of type. Notes at this period were lozenge-shaped or square, with centred stems; during the 16th century engravers designed round notes (corresponding with contemporary calligraphy) but these were not universally used until the late 17th century. Music printing from movable type remained in use during much of the 17th century and the 18th, and persisted in some kinds of publication into the 19th and even the 20th, by which time the fragmentary staff-lines and uneven beaming of much of the early and inferior work had given way to music of a clear and smooth appearance.
Movable type, however, was inadequate for some kinds of music, particularly keyboard music with rapid notes and chords and florid instrumental or vocal lines. The closest analogy to the hand of the copyist was the hand of the engraver, wielding a steel point on a copper plate. Engraving (‘intaglio’) had been used for printing in the 15th century and was adapted to music in the 1530s, though only for lute tablature; for mensural music it was used late in the 16th century, notably by Simone Verovio of Rome, in music for voices or keyboard or lute. The technique was quickly taken up in England and the Low Countries and, in the late 17th century, in France and Germany. The process involves taking a metal plate (copper or, later, pewter), planning the layout in detail, then marking the staff-lines, the note-heads, the stems and various symbols (clefs, accidentals etc), either by scoring with a steel point (sometimes acid was used for deeper etching) or by using a series of punches; traditions differed between periods, countries and individual workshops. The music could then be printed direct from the plate on a press. At the beginning of the 18th century, Paris, London and Amsterdam were the largest centres of music publishing; later in the century and in the 19th, Vienna and particularly Leipzig became increasingly important.
In 1796 a process called lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder. This is based on the principle that a surface (originally of stone, but many other substances were used) could be prepared in such a way that some parts of it would accept a greasy ink and others would not; the image of music could be inscribed on such a surface and it could then be used for the printing of further copies. This offset process has remained the basis for music printing, though today the ‘stone’ is normally prepared photographically. The process of origination of the image, however, is still needed, and engraving remains one of the principal methods; others in use today include transfers (‘Notaset’), stencils, music typewriters and various computer-based systems.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: printing |
For more information on printing, visit Britannica.com.
| Architecture: printing |
Forming a permanent impression in a semihardened paint film as a result of pressure from an object placed on it.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: printing |
For an account of type design, see type; typography. See also book; bookbinding.
Relief Printing
Early History
The story of the invention of printing and of its early days is told in the article type. In the 15th cent. the art spread, directly and indirectly, from Mainz to many parts of Europe. It was brought to England in 1476 by William Caxton; to the New World in 1539 by Juan Pablos, who set up his press in Mexico City.
Mechanization
The first papermaking machine producing a continuous roll of paper and capable of delivering sheets in specific sizes—the Fourdrinier machine—was installed in London in 1803. Steam power was successfully applied to the printing press in 1810 by Friedrich Koenig, a German. The invention did not improve the quality of the product but greatly increased the output of the machine. In Koenig's press, the type bed remained flat as in hand presses, but the paper was pressed on the type by a cylinder. The Adams power press was invented by an American, Isaac Adams, in 1827.
In 1846 and 1847, Richard March Hoe designed a rotary press in which stereotype plates were for the first time arranged in a true cylinder. In 1866 a press known later as the Walter press was patented in England; in this press the printing surfaces were not types but stereotype plates curved to form parts of cylinders. The invention of ways of making paper in sheets of any desired length, so that paper could be fed to cylinder presses from rolls, assisted in increasing the speed of printing. Machines for folding newspapers were incorporated with the power cylinder press.
Typesetting
Not until the late 19th cent. were typesetting machines invented. The Linotype machine, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in Baltimore in 1884, produced a metal slug corresponding to a single line of type as set by hand in printing. It was first put into operation at the New York Tribune in 1886. Operated from a keyboard like that of a typewriter, the machine assembled brass matrices into a line, cast the line, and distributed the matrices. The Intertype machine was substantially similar to the Linotype machine, and the matrices made by either machine could be used in the other.
The third principal typesetting machine is the Monotype, patented by Tolbert Lanston in 1887 and first produced commercially in 1897. The Monotype makes each character separately, assembling the characters as in hand composition, for which the Monotype characters can be used. Before electronic composition, monotype had an advantage in setting certain kinds of copy, e.g., mathematical and scientific material, where special symbols or other problems may be involved.
Intaglio
In intaglio printing, such as the etching and the steel engraving, the design to be printed is lower than the surface of the plate, which is wiped clean before each impression, leaving the incised design filled with ink, which the paper receives. In gravure intaglio printing, tone is produced by varying the thickness of the ink of the printing surface through depressions of varying depth; minute points constitute the clean surface that keeps the paper from being pressed into the depressions. In photogravure the gravure plate is made by a photographic process. Rotogravure is photogravure adapted for printing by a rotary or cylinder press.
Lithography
The third kind of printing, lithography, also known as planographic printing, was devised by Aloys Senefelder. Flat stones were the first lithographic plates and are still used, although a variety of thin metal, plastic, and paper plates are now also employed. A drawing is made on the plate with greasy ink or crayon, and water is then applied to the plate. When the plate is inked for printing, the greasy parts accept the ink and the wet parts do not. Preparing a printing surface so that ink will adhere only to parts of it is basic in all planographic printing.
Collotype, also called photogelatin, is a lithographic process that uses a gelatin-faced plate to achieve the tonal distribution obtained through screen dots in engraving. It is chiefly used in the reproduction of fine illustrations or of scientific subject matter requiring accuracy of detail.
Photolithography, offset, litho-offset, and offset lithography are synonyms in commercial printing for the most widely used form of planographic printing, based on a modification of the lithographic press featuring a rubber-covered cylinder between the printing cylinder and the impression cylinder. The plate cylinder transfers the image to the rubber blanket cylinder, which in turn offsets it on the paper carried by the impression cylinder. Offset and other forms of planographic printing, through many technical refinements, make possible increased production speeds, improved quality in the reproduction of fine tones, and a substantial reduction in the number of impressions required to reproduce full-color copy.
Screen Process
The fourth traditional type of printing, screen process, includes silk screen and has special applications in the printing industry. Silk screen printing is a form of stencil printing, i.e., printing where the ink is applied to the back of the image carrier and pushed through porous or open areas. The image is on a piece of silk stretched on a frame and backed by a rubber squeegee containing ink. The nonprinting areas on the silk screen are blocked out, and the ink is pushed through the porous areas corresponding to the design; the process is widely used for posters and for printing on glass, plastics, and textured surfaces. Mimeographing is another commercial application of stencil printing.
Illustrations and Color Printing
In three kinds of printing—relief, intaglio, and planographic—illustrations are often produced by the halftone process, in which a plate is made by photographing through glass marked with a network of fine lines (see also photoengraving). A usual form of color printing is by the Ben Day, or Benday, process, invented by New York printer Benjamin Day, which utilizes celluloid sheets to achieve proper shading and color. Printing in colors is sometimes done, as excellently in Japan, by applying inks of different colors by hand to the printing surface, but usually a separate printing surface is used for each ink.
In full-color printing four standard colors are used—yellow, cyan (a hue between blue and green), magenta, and black—the first three being the complementary colors of blue, red, and green. Other colors are produced by printing one color over another, as green by printing cyan on yellow. Black is used to print the text accompanying the illustration, and it is often used as a fourth color in the illustration itself to add strength and detail.
Modern Innovations
In recent years the use of photographic processes has expanded greatly, and the development of electronic devices, as well as other technological advances, has introduced a new era in the evolution of printing. The development of typewriters and personal computers capable of delivering justified and proportionally spaced copy has made possible the production of camera-ready books and has met the demands for several special types of printing.
Perhaps the most revolutionary innovation has been the introduction of photocomposition machines for setting type by photographic means. Two of these are analogous in principle to the Monotype and Intertype casting machines and have been produced by the respective companies under the trademarks of Monophoto and Intertype Fotosetter. The Linofilm is a phototypesetting machine developed by the Linotype Corporation. The Photon machine, invented by the Frenchmen René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud, using an electric typewriter connected with a computer and a photographing unit, is noteworthy. Almost exclusively electronic, it can deliver justified type on film in a wide variety of styles at extraordinary speed.
Today photocomposition has been adopted in lithography, gravure, and letterpress printing, and its use, together with other electronic techniques, has revolutionized the printing industry (see optical sensing). In recent years some newspapers have started to use pagination systems, in which newspapers are electronically composed by computer, output to a negative, and a plate is made of the negative.
Many reproduction processes other than those cited above have also been developed. Xerography, or electrostatic printing, has been widely adopted for photocopying; it is also the basis of the laser printer, one type of computer printer. It is also an effective means of producing master plates for offset printing. One xerographic device is used for making full-size reprints of out-of-print books from microfilm. Other duplicating processes of commercial importance are the Multigraph, which operates on the letterpress principle; the Multilith, basically a small offset press; the Ditto, a duplicator using a special fluid to remove ink from the master plate and transfer it to the paper; and the well-known photostat process.
Bibliography
An excellent selected bibliography is H. Lehmann-Haupt, One Hundred Books about Bookmaking (1949). See W. Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word (1970); L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, The Coming of the Book (1976); E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979).
| Word Tutor: printing |
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
— Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937)
| Wikipedia: Printing |
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Part of the series on the |
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| Woodblock printing | 200 | |
| Movable type | 1040 | |
| Intaglio | 1430s | |
| Printing press | 1454 | |
| Lithography | 1796 | |
| Chromolithography | 1837 | |
| Rotary press | 1843 | |
| Flexography | 1873 | |
| Mimeograph | 1876 | |
| Hot metal typesetting | 1886 | |
| Offset press | 1903 | |
| Screen-printing | 1907 | |
| Dye-sublimation | 1957 | |
| Phototypesetting | 1960s | |
| Photocopier | 1960s | |
| Pad printing | 1960s | |
| Laser printer | 1969 | |
| Dot matrix printer | 1970 | |
| Thermal printer | 1970s | |
| Inkjet printer | 1976 | |
| 3D printing | 1986 | |
| Stereolithography | 1986 | |
| Digital press | 1993 | |
| Frescography | 1998 | |
Printing is a process for reproducing text and image, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing.
Contents |
Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns that was used widely throughout East Asia. It originated in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later on paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220, and from Egypt to the 4th century.
By AD 593, the first printing press was invented in China, and the first printed newspaper, Kaiyuan Za Bao, was available in Beijing in AD 713. It was a woodblock printing. And the Tianemmen scrolls, the earliest known complete woodblock printed book with illustrations, was printed in China in AD 868; it did not supersede the use of block printing.
Woodblock printing on cloth appeared in Egypt by the 4th century, though it is not clear if the Egyptian printing of cloth was learned from China or developed separately. Block printing, called tarsh in Arabic was developed in Arabic Egypt during the 9th-10th centuries, mostly for prayers and amulets. There is some evidence to suggest that the print blocks were made from a variety of different materials besides wood, including metals such as tin, lead and cast iron, as well as stone, glass and clay. However, the techniques employed are uncertain and they appear to have had very little influence outside of the Muslim world. Though Europe adopted woodblock printing from the Muslim world, initially for fabric, the technique of metal block printing remained unknown in Europe. Block printing later went out of use in Islamic Central Asia after movable type printing was introduced from China.[1][2]
Block printing first came to Christian Europe as a method for printing on cloth, where it was common by 1300. Images printed on cloth for religious purposes could be quite large and elaborate, and when paper became relatively easily available, around 1400, the medium transferred very quickly to small woodcut religious images and playing cards printed on paper. These prints were produced in very large numbers from about 1425 onwards.
Around the mid-century, block-books, woodcut books with both text and images, usually carved in the same block, emerged as a cheaper alternative to manuscripts and books printed with movable type. These were all short heavily illustrated works, the bestsellers of the day, repeated in many different block-book versions: the Ars moriendi and the Biblia pauperum were the most common. There is still some controversy among scholars as to whether their introduction preceded or, the majority view, followed the introduction of movable type, with the range of estimated dates being between about 1440 and 1460.[3]
Movable type is the system of printing and typography using movable pieces of metal type, made by casting from matrices struck by letterpunches. Movable type allowed for much more flexible processes than hand copying or block printing.
Around 1040, the first known movable type system was created in China by Bi Sheng out of porcelain.[4] Sheng used clay type, which broke easily, but Wang Zhen later carved a more durable type from wood by 1298 AD, and developed a complex system of revolving tables and number-association with written Chinese characters that made typesetting and printing more efficient. However, the main method in use there remained woodblock printing.
Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced what is regarded as an independent invention of movable type in Europe (see printing press), along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mould. Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin and antimony – the same components still used today.[5]
Johannes Gutenberg's work on the printing press began in approximately 1436 when he partnered with Andreas Dritzehen — a man he had previously instructed in gem-cutting—and Andreas Heilmann, owner of a paper mill.[6] It was not until a 1439 lawsuit against Gutenberg that official record exists; witnesses testimony discussed type, an inventory of metals (including lead) and his type mold.[6]
Compared to woodblock printing, movable type page setting was quicker and more durable. The metal type pieces were more durable and the lettering was more uniform, leading to typography and fonts. The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible (1455) established the superiority of movable type, and printing presses rapidly spread across Europe, leading up to the Renaissance, and later all around the world. Today, practically all movable type printing ultimately derives from Gutenberg's movable type printing, which is often regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium.[7]
The rotary printing press was invented by Richard March Hoe in 1847. It uses impressions curved around a cylinder to print on long continuous rolls of paper or other substrates. Rotary drum printing was later significantly improved by William Bullock.
Across the world, over 45 trillion pages (2005 figure) are printed annually.[8] In 2006 there were approximately 30,700 printing companies in the United States, accounting for $112 billion, according to the 2006 U.S. Industry & Market Outlook by Barnes Reports. Print jobs that move through the Internet made up 12.5% of the total U.S. printing market last year, according to research firm InfoTrend/CAP Ventures.
Offset printing is a widely used printing technique where the inked image is transferred (or "offset") from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface. When used in combination with the lithographic process, which is based on the repulsion of oil and water, the offset technique employs a flat (planographic) image carrier on which the image to be printed obtains ink from ink rollers, while the non-printing area attracts a film of water, keeping the non-printing areas ink-free.
Currently, most books and newspapers are printed using the technique of offset lithography. Other common techniques include:
Gravure printing is an intaglio printing technique, where the image to be printed is made up of small depressions in the surface of the printing plate. The cells are filled with ink and the excess is scraped off the surface with a doctor blade, then a rubber-covered roller presses paper onto the surface of the plate and into contact with the ink in the cells. The printing plates are usually made from copper and may be produced by digital engraving or laser etching.
Gravure printing is used for long, high-quality print runs such as magazines, mail-order catalogues, packaging, and printing onto fabric and wallpaper. It is also used for printing postage stamps and decorative plastic laminates, such as kitchen worktops.
Samuel Hartlib, who was exiled in Britain and enthusiastic about social and cultural reforms, wrote in 1641 that "the art of printing will so spread knowledge that the common people, knowing their own rights and liberties, will not be governed by way of oppression".[9] For both churchmen and governments, it was concerning that print allowed readers, eventually including those from all classes of society, to study religious texts and politically sensitive issues by themselves, instead of thinking mediated by the religious and political authorities.
It took a long long time for print to penetrate Russia and the Orthodox Christian world, a region (including modern Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria) where reading ability was largely restricted to the clergy. In 1564, a White Russian brought a press to Moscow, and soon after that his workshop was destroyed by a mob.
In the Muslim world, printing, especially in Arabic or Turkish was strongly opposed throughout the early modern period (printing in Hebrew was sometimes permitted). Indeed, the Muslim countries have been regarded as a barrier to the passage of printing from China to the West. According to an imperial ambassador to Istanbul in the middle of the sixteenth century, it was a sin for the Turks to print religious books. In 1515, Sultan Selim I issued a decree under which the practice of printing would be punishable by death. At the end of the century, Sultan Murad III permitted the sale of non-religious printed books in Arabic characters, yet the majority were imported from Italy.
Jews were banned from German printing guilds; as a result Hebrew printing sprang up in Italy, beginning in 1470 in Rome, then speading to other towns. Local rulers had the authority to grant or revoke licenses to publish Hebrew books.[10]
It was thought that the introduction of the printing medium 'would strengthen religion and enhance the power of monarchs.' [11] The majority of books were of religious nature with the church and crown regulating the content. The consequences of printing wrong material were extreme. Meyrowitz [12] used the example of William Carter who, in 1584, printed a pro-Catholic pamphlet in Protestant-dominated England. The consequence of his action was hanging.
The widespread distribution of the Bible 'had a revolutionary impact, because it decreased the power of the Catholic Church as the prime possessor and interpretor of God's word.' [13]
Print gave a broader range of readers access to knowledge and enabled later generations to build on the intellectual achievements of earlier ones. Print, according to Acton in his lecture On the Study of History (1895), gave "assurance that the work of the Renaissance would last, that what was written would be accessible to all, that such an occultation of knowledge and ideas as had depressed the Middle Ages would never recur, that not an idea would be lost".[14]
Print was instrumental in changing the nature of reading within society.
Elizabeth Eisenstein identifies two long term effects of the invention of printing. She claims that print created a sustained and uniform reference for knowledge as well as allowing for comparison between incompatible views. (Eisenstein in Briggs and Burke, 2002: p21)
Asa Briggs and Peter Burke identify five kinds of reading that developed in relation to the introduction of print:
"While the invention of printing has been discussed conventionally in terms of its value for spreading ideas, it’s even greater contribution is its furthering of the long-developing shift in the relationship between space and discourse"[15].
The proliferation of media that Ong is discussing in relation to the introduction of the printing press, to the death of an oral culture and that this new culture had more of an emphasis on the visual rather than in an auditory medium. As such the printing press gave birth to a more accessible and widely available source of knowledge in the sense that it broke down the boundaries between the possessors of knowledge and the masses. The narrative or discourse now existed in what would become indirectly through time, the global village.
The invention of printing also changed the occupational structure of European cities. Printers emerged as a new group of artisans for whom literacy was essential, although the much more labour-intensive occupation of the scribe naturally declined. Proof-correcting arose as a new occupation, while a rise in the amount of booksellers and librarians naturally followed the explosion in the numbers of books.
Digital printing accounts for approximately 9% of the 45 trillion pages printed annually (2005 figure) around the world.[8]
Printing at home or in an office or engineering environment is subdivided into:
Some of the more common printing technologies are:
Vendors typically stress the total cost to operate the equipment, involving complex calculations that include all cost factors involved in the operation as well as the capital equipment costs, amortization, etc. For the most part, toner systems beat inkjet in the long run, whereas inkjets are less expensive in the initial purchase price.
Professional digital printing (using toner) primarily uses an electrical charge to transfer toner or liquid ink to the substrate it is printed on. Digital print quality has steadily improved from early color and black & white copiers to sophisticated colour digital presses like the Xerox iGen3, the Kodak Nexpress, the HP Indigo Digital Press series and the InfoPrint 5000. The iGen3 and Nexpress use toner particles and the Indigo uses liquid ink. The InfoPrint 5000 is a full-color, continuous forms inkjet drop-on-demand printing system. All handle variable data and rival offset in quality. Digital offset presses are also called direct imaging presses, although these presses can receive computer files and automatically turn them into print-ready plates, they cannot insert variable data.
Small press and fanzines generally use digital printing or more rarely xerography. Prior to the introduction of cheap photocopying the use of machines such as the spirit duplicator, hectograph, and mimeograph was common.
On the effects of Gutenberg's printing
Early printers manuals The classic manual of early hand-press technology is
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Look up printing in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
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| Translations: Printing |
Dansk (Danish)
n. - trykning, bogtrykkerkunst, oplag, kopiering
idioms:
Nederlands (Dutch)
druk, boekdrukkunst, druktechniek, drukken
Français (French)
n. - (Art, Ind, Imprim) imprimerie, impression, tirage
idioms:
Deutsch (German)
n. - Drucken, Auflage, Druckschrift
idioms:
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - τυπογραφία, εκτύπωση, τυπογραφική εμφάνιση, τύπωμα
idioms:
Italiano (Italian)
edizione, stampa
idioms:
Português (Portuguese)
n. - impressão
idioms:
Русский (Russian)
печатное издание, печатание
idioms:
Español (Spanish)
n. - edición, tipografía
idioms:
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - tryckning, tryck
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
印刷, 印花, 印刷术
idioms:
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 印刷, 印花, 印刷術
idioms:
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 印刷, 印刷物, 型付け, 焼付け, 活字体で書いた文字, 版
idioms:
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) طبعه, ورق الطباعه
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - הדפסה, מהדורה, אותיות דפוס, דפוס
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| Shopping: printing |
| Offset Printing | printing calculator |
| Pull Printing | printing calculators |
 | bat printing |
| offset press (graphic arts) |
| ld. (abbreviation) |
Copyrights:
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Sci-Tech Encyclopedia. McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Copyright © 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Thesaurus. Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Architecture. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more |
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| Word Tutor. Copyright © 2004-present by eSpindle Learning, a 501(c) nonprofit organization. All rights reserved. eSpindle provides personalized spelling and vocabulary tutoring online; free trial. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Printing". Read more |
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| Translations. Copyright © 2007, WizCom Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved. Read more |
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