2. Bi Sheng in the Northern Song Dynasty brought the greatest revolution to ancient printing technology. He innovatively changed the engraving and printing mold to "live", and then carved words on the clay blank of the same specification and fired them hard to make clay movable type. In this way, according to the content to be printed, the characters are selected in the wooden lattice for typesetting and inking printing, which realizes "making words once and reusing them" and saves the hard work of carving wooden boards again and again. Due to the great saving of manpower and material resources, books were printed in large quantities, and the recorded culture was widely spread, which greatly promoted the prosperity of ancient culture in China. Even modern letterpress printing, its basic principles and methods are born out of ancient movable type printing.
3. Traditional newspapers and books are printed in type, so "lead" and "fire" are indispensable. At that time, metal lead was first melted with fire and then cast into type. This process is labor-intensive, pollutes the environment and hinders the health of typesetters.
4.1In August, 974, China established the national key scientific and technological project "748 Project" and developed the Chinese character information processing system. The most difficult step is to input and output printed Chinese characters to the computer. English has only 26 letters, which is relatively easy to store in a computer, while there are more than 5,000 commonly used Chinese characters with complex and changeable structures.
5. 1975, Academician Wang Xuan, who was teaching in Peking University at that time, initiated the idea of "information compression technology for describing Chinese characters with contours and parameters", which used parameters to represent regular strokes and contours to represent irregular strokes, greatly reducing the storage of Chinese character information without distortion, and saving accurate Chinese character information into the computer for the first time. Wang Xuan's team also adopted laser phototypesetting technology, and there were no products abroad at that time. After four years of continuous research, it has successfully realized the output of Chinese characters from the computer.
6.1In July, 979, Peking University Hanyu Information Processing Technology Research Laboratory used its own phototypesetting system to output an octoformat newspaper sample paper with complicated layout in a very short time, which was composed of various fonts and the header was "Chinese Character Information Processing". This is the first time to output Chinese newspaper layout by laser imagesetter, which marks the beginning of a new era of Chinese character printing. Since then, Chinese character printing has bid farewell to "lead and fire" and entered the era of "light and electricity".
7. With the continuous progress of printing technology and intelligent equipment, at present, we can easily carry out large-scale printing operations with the help of advanced printing equipment and information technology. Making a book now mainly requires plate making, printing and binding. Compared with the manuscript we usually print with a printer, in the scene of large-scale printing before the release of a book, plate-making offset printing has more paper choices, faster production speed and stronger inking effect, and has advantages in cost, efficiency and finished product quality.
8. By comparing with block printing, we can understand the principle of modern printing technology. The first is plate making. Assuming that all prepress preparation processes have been completed, we will use CTP, that is, computer-to-plate system. Its function is to make plates that can be directly used by the printing machine according to the printed materials prepared on the computer. Compared with block printing, block printing is carried out according to the text content. We take the widely used and relatively simple thermal crosslinking CTP as an example, and its plate (which can be understood as a blank plate in block printing) is mainly composed of heat-sensitive coating and hydrophilic plate base. Heat-sensitive coatings are generally composed of water (alkali) soluble film-forming resin (phenolic resin), heat-sensitive crosslinking agent and infrared dye, and hydrophilic plate base is generally aluminum plate base.
9.CTP machine loads plates, and its laser generator and control system can generate hundreds of laser beams to irradiate plates according to the image information printed in the computer. At this time, each laser is equivalent to a carving knife, and the computer controls the carving operation on the plate. The infrared dye in the coating on the plate can effectively absorb the light energy of infrared laser and convert the absorbed light energy into heat energy, so that the heat-sensitive crosslinking agent can reach the reaction temperature and react with the film-forming resin, and the heat-sensitive coating in the corresponding area loses water (alkali) solubility. After that, alkali-soluble development treatment will be carried out to keep these parts that have lost alkali-solubility. The heat-sensitive coating in the dark area will still be alkali-soluble without cross-linking reaction, and will dissolve during development, exposing the plate base as a blank part. This is the engraving process of infrared light on the plate.
10. Now that we have the engraved printing plate, the next step is printing. After the working principle of modern printing machine is simplified, block printing can still be applied. Because the part with content on the printing plate is hydrophobic and oleophilic, and the blank part exposed by dissolution is hydrophilic and oleophobic, it is easy for us to stick ink on the recorded part and then print the ink on the printing paper to complete the printing part of the book. There are many kinds of modern printing machines, among which the printing speed of ordinary offset press reaches 15000 sheets/hour, which greatly improves the color management ability and stability.
1 1. Printed books and papers need to be bound at last. Now the books we buy are getting more and more beautiful, and some hardcover books even make people feel like works of art. The binding process is so complicated and exquisite that it is generally divided into cutting, folding and binding, while thinning involves dozens of steps such as book supply, flattening, brushing and drying.
12. In the past, post-press binding was all about "crowd tactics and simple equipment operation". With the increase of labor cost and the progress of manufacturing technology, digital and intelligent binding line has been popularized. Every step is to use machines instead of manpower to realize auto production line's work. Printing paper is supplied here, and bound books can be bought at that end. With the deepening of intelligent manufacturing, more and more printing enterprises carry out digital transformation, adopt automatic and intelligent printing equipment, and introduce information management means such as MIS (Management Information System) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) to realize digital and intelligent management of the whole production process. In the intelligent workshop of the printing plant, the whole process from business order taking to production internal system scheduling, to plate making, printing, and finally to cutting, folding and binding is connected by MES. The logistics system adopts AGV (Automatic Navigation Vehicle) for transportation. In the control system, the working state and production situation of each process can be seen intuitively, which minimizes the dependence on labor, fully optimizes the production process and improves the products. This is why the books we buy now are more and more beautifully bound and printed.