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The letterpress printing process remained virtually unchanged until the 1950s when it was replaced with the more efficient and commercially viable offset printing process. The labor-intensive nature of the typesetting and need to store vast amounts of lead or wooden type resulted in the letterpress printing process falling out of favour.
Relief printing including woodcut; Intaglio (printmaking) or copperplate engraving; Planographic printing; Line engraving; 1917 office with a "Multigraph" duplicating machine at lower right. Printing/Applied ink methods Letterpress printing (via printing press) Gelatin methods (also indirect method) Hectograph; Collography, autocopyist
A Ludlow Typograph is a hot metal typesetting system used in letterpress printing. The device casts bars, or slugs of type, out of type metal primarily consisting of lead. These slugs are used for the actual printing, and then are melted down and recycled on the spot. It was used to print large-type material such as newspaper headlines or posters.
Letterpress printing was the normal form of printing text from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century and remained in wide use for books and other uses until the second half of the 20th century, when offset printing was developed. More recently, letterpress printing has seen a revival in an artisanal form.
Woodblock printing had been known in China for centuries. It was innovations in type casting that made for Gutenberg's breakthrough of commercially printing. [1] Although using matrices was a technique known well before his time, Johannes Gutenberg adapted their use to a conveniently adjustable hand mould, enabling one to easily and accurately cast identical multiple instances of any character.
Before computers were invented, and thus becoming computerized (or digital) typesetting, font sizes were changed by replacing the characters with a different size of type. In letterpress printing, individual letters and punctuation marks were cast on small metal blocks, known as "sorts," and then arranged to form the text for a page.
Gutenberg's key invention and contribution to movable-type printing in Europe, the hand mould, was the first practical means of making cheap copies of letterpunches in the vast quantities needed to print complete books, making the movable-type printing process a viable enterprise. [citation needed]
The printing press is most famous for its windmill-like automatic paper feed mechanism. There are two blades that rotate from the paper feed, where it picks up a sheet of paper; to the platen, where the printing impression is made; to the delivery rack, where the paper is released; followed by the blade pointing straight up ready to start the next cycle.