At the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, people in our country invented engraving printing, using pear or jujube as plates, carving pictures and texts with a knife, then painting on the pages with ink, then covering the paper on the inked plates, and then brushing it with a brush under pressure, thus completing the transfer of pictures and texts. There is an obvious defect in engraving printing in this period, that is, every new graphic information needs to be re-engraved with a new block, and the engraving process of the block is very laborious and time-consuming, and the solution to this problem first appeared in China.

In Song Dynasty, Bi Sheng invented movable type printing with cement. Movable type consists of single characters, which can be combined to print related graphic information and can be reused after being disassembled.

With the development of engraving technology and movable type printing, in 1340, China invented color engraving overprint, that is, the content of the same page was carved into several printing plates with the same size according to the color requirements, and each plate was printed with a color, which was printed on the same piece of paper one after another, and the color changed from the first two colors to the later five colors and seven colors. By the 171920s, the woodcut watermark version was invented, and its printed matter was beautifully carved, colorful, moderate in depth, fresh and natural.

Movable type printing developed in14th century. German Gutenberg summed up the experience of predecessors and the achievements of printing technology at that time, and developed movable type printing with lead, antimony and tin alloys, which greatly reduced the cost, improved the quality and speed of text printing and made outstanding contributions to the world printing history.

Gutenberg was the first European to use movable type printing, and there are not many historical records about him. At present, it is uncertain whether he developed lead movable type by drawing lessons from the movable type technology of eastern countries or by the results of his own independent research. It should be said that Gutenberg's most important contribution is not the use of movable type printing, but the development of movable type casting technology. Gutenberg was not the first person to print with metal movable type. 1 1 At the beginning of the century, China first invented clay movable type, but its hardness was not ideal. After China invented movable type technology, it spread to Korea earlier today. /kloc-In the middle of 0/3rd century, Koreans cast movable type in bronze. About a hundred years later, Gutenberg developed lead alloy movable type technology, which was easier to cast and had better printing effect.

1845, the British made a photographic solution composed of dichromate and glue, thus realizing the production of copper and zinc plates by photography, which is another important development in the history of printing. Thus, the ability of human beings to copy reality has taken a big step forward, especially for the recording of historical materials.

Early printing was done on hand-operated wooden printing machines, a type of Gutenberg era. At that time, it was often a busy day to complete a 200-page printed matter, as shown in the following figure:

/kloc-in the middle of 0/7th century, 2000 pages of printed matter can be printed in the same working day, and the efficiency is improved 10 times. Nowadays, the Suba series offset press in Heidelberg can print more than 6.5438+00,000 sheets per hour. If calculated by day, the efficiency will be improved by at least 100 times, as shown in the figure:

After World War II, electronic computers brought revolutionary changes to prepress technology. Text typesetting developed from manual imagesetter to automatic laser scanning imagesetter, which made text typesetting leap from lead fire era to electro-optical era. In 1970s, the invention and use of electronic color separator made the image processing faster and the quality higher.

In the 1990s, with the rapid development of computer hardware and software in the professional field, the business process of commercial printing has gradually realized more perfect digitalization in countries and regions with advanced printing technology. Especially in the prepress field, the emergence of Desktop Publishing (DTP) has brought another revolution to the contemporary printing industry. Under the control of the computer, scanning, digital camera, direct plate making, digital proofing, digital printing machine and other equipment have all realized digital joint operation, as shown in the following figure:

The printing industry has entered the 2 1 century, and the popularity and rapid growth of the internet have made the realization of cross-international printing business a reality. Printing, once an ancient term, will be a technical field that needs continuous long-term learning to effectively control for every relevant practitioner today.