Printing

Fabric Printing

The box printing technique for reproducing text, drawings, and images has been widely used throughout East Asia . It arose in ancient China as a method of printing on textiles , and then on paper . The earliest surviving prints printed on fabric are Chinese and are dated no later than 220 A.D. e. The closest western samples belong to the 4th century and belong to Ancient Egypt of the Roman era.

In East Asia

The earliest extant engravings come from China during the Han Dynasty (before 220 CE), they were used to print tri-color images of flowers on silk , and the earliest example of an engraving on paper, also Chinese, dates back to the middle of the seventh century.

In the ninth century, printing on paper was already practiced professionally, it was from this period that the first surviving complete printed book, the Diamond Sutra (now in the British Library ), is dated ^[3] . In the tenth century, 400 thousand copies of some sutras and paintings were printed, Confucian classics came out. An experienced printer could print up to 2000 sheets of double pages per day ^[4] .

From China, typography spread to Korea and Japan, which used Chinese logograms ; Chinese printing techniques have also been used in Turpan and Vietnam using other fonts. However, unlike another invention - paper, the printing technique has never been borrowed by the Islamic world ^[5] .

Middle East

Piece printing on fabric appeared in Roman Egypt by the fourth century. Woodcut , called “tarsh” in Arabic, was developed in Arab Egypt in the 9th-10th centuries, mainly used for prayers and written amulets. There are some reasons to believe that these prints (prints) were made from non-wood materials, possibly from tin , lead or clay . The methods used seem to have very little influence outside the Muslim world. Although Europe adopted the print of wood engraving from the Muslim world, originally for printing on fabric, the technique of metal woodcutting in Europe remained unknown. Woodcut later went out of use in Islamic Central Asia after a movable type seal was adopted from China. ^[6]

In Europe

For the first time in Christian Europe, the technique of printing on fabric appeared around 1300. Images printed on fabric for religious purposes could be quite large and complex, and when the paper became relatively easily accessible, around 1400, small prints on religious subjects and playing cards printed on paper immediately spread. Mass production of printed paper products began around 1425. ^[7]

Inventing Typography

Typography was invented twice: in China and in medieval Europe . In China, typography was invented, according to one source (Julien, “Documents sur l'art d'imprimerie”), in 581 AD. e., and according to Chinese sources - between 936 and 993 years (for details, see the four great inventions ). The first accurately dated printed text is a Chinese woodcut copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra , published in 868 .

Woodcut

Later they began to cut the text with a knife on wooden boards; this is the so-called woodcut . The oldest work of this art that has come down to us, bearing the date of printing, dates back to 1423 (see “The Bible of the Poor ”). Whether printing was done with a machine or with brushes is unknown; in any case, surviving books were printed anopistographically (that is, only on one side of the sheet). Of the books printed in this way, the most famous are the so-called “ Donates ” (the composition of the Roman grammar Elias Donatus ). It is not proven that Donats were printed much earlier than Gutenberg's invention; on the other hand, it is known that whiteboards were used long after Gutenberg ; Woodcut also existed in 1475 , in 1482, and even in 1504 .

Mobile Letters

The history of printing in the modern sense of the word begins from the moment when they began to make metal, movable, convex letters, carved in mirror image. Of these, lines were drawn and stamped on paper using a press.

Between 1041 and 1049, Chinese Bi Sheng came up with the idea of ​​making a typeface from burnt clay, but this method was less common than woodcuts, since there are thousands of characters in Chinese writing and therefore making a typeface was too time-consuming.

In Europe, the typeface appeared in the second third of the 15th century , and almost all scholars attribute it to the German Johann Gutenberg . Johann Mentelin in Strasbourg , which had a printing house as early as 1458 , and Pfister in Bamberg, previously considered the first printers, should be recognized as students of Gutenberg. Almost all Western European nations challenged the Germans the honor of inventing typography. The Dutch most convincingly defended their claims, alluding to the invention of typography by Lawrence Janszoon Coster . Among Italians, Pamfilio Castaldi in Feltre was considered the inventor of moving letters: as they say, he did not attach any importance to his invention, ceded it to Fust, who, with his comrades, used it to establish a printing house in Mainz. However, not a single line was printed by Castaldi that could confirm the reliability of this story . To the testimonies of contemporaries speaking in favor of Gutenberg, it is necessary to include the instructions of Peter Scheffer , son-in-law of Fust and the successor of his work: in the publication of the Institutions of Justinian in 1468 he refers to Gutenberg and Fust as the first printers. Driven by a kindred feeling, he probably attributed to Fust the honor of an invention belonging to Guttenberg alone. In 1472, Wilhelm Fische, rector of the University of Paris, in a letter to Robert Hagen said: “They say that near the city of Mainz there was a certain John Bonemontan (Gutenberg), who first invented the art of printing.” Matvey Palmerii, in the continuation of the Eusebius Chronicle, printed in Venice in 1483, points out that "the art of printing books was invented in 1440 by Gutenberg in Mainz." Finally, John Schaeffer, son of Peter Schaeffer, in his dedication to the translation of Titus Livius in 1505 points to Gutenberg as the first printer, although in other places he ascribes this invention to Fust.

Modern printing technologies are focused on the industrial production of large runs of book, magazine, business, newspaper, label and packaging products. There are three main ways to reproduce text and illustrations: tall , deep and flat .

High printing (also printing ^{[8] [9] [10] [11]} ) in printing is a printing method that differs from flat and intaglio printing in that the printing elements on the form are located above the blanks , so that when printing, blank elements of the paper do not relate to ^{[8] [10] [11]} .

On the printing form of letterpress printing elements are located above the white space. Paint is applied to the surface of the protruding printing elements. In contact with paper, for a complete transition of paint, pressure is necessary. Before the invention of printing machines, a press was used for this purpose. To reproduce text and line art consisting of separate strokes and lines, it is not difficult to make a printed form even on a board, since all printing elements are on the same level. It is easy to apply paint on them with a swab or roller, put paper and press it to transfer paint ^{[8] [11]} .

Intaglio printing, intaglio - in the printing industry, the method of printing using a printing plate on which the printing elements are recessed with respect to white space. The technology was invented at the end of the 19th century by ^[12] . The intaglio differs from flat and letterpress in that the thickness of the ink layer on one print can vary from tens to hundreds of micrometers , while for other printing technologies this parameter is stable and amounts to about 1 micrometer. This intaglio printing property provides the relief of image elements that protrude above the surface of the paper, when you touch the products, relief is felt. ^[13] .

Due to the ability to fine-tune the relief of the image, the technology is widely used for the production of documents, banknotes and other securities ^{[14] [15]} .

Due to the high cost of prepress and mold production, intaglio printing is cost-effective for large-circulation products with high print run resistance. In this regard, this technology leads the packaging market.

Flat printing in printing is a printing method using forms on which printing and white space elements are located in the same plane and differ only in physicochemical properties ^[16] . The basis for flat printing forms, as a rule, are metal sheets (plates) - single-layer in the case of monometallic forms and multilayer in the case of bimetallic. To make the mold, the plate is covered with a photosensitive layer and illuminated through the photoform used as a template. In the printing industry, on the basis of this principle, the majority of offset printing machines operate , less often the di-litho method (flat printing without an intermediate link) is used. In the visual arts, this concept is implemented in lithography .