PRINTING
LETTER PRESS
A short tour to the printing room at New York School of Technology by D304.Ā Having been to a printing press before with a much broader spectrum of movable type which was really amazing to seeāIt was the printing press that published the national new paper named The Chronicle.Ā Now we are in the digital era of modern technology, it was amazing once again to see a state of the art printing machine of the 15th century, the āLetter Pressā.Ā Letter press printing is known as direct printing, or linotype, and is manually operated.Ā The operation starts by applying ink upon an ink plate, then the machine is turned on.Ā Next, a roller interacts with the ink plate in which the ink get evenly spread on the entire ink plate.Ā Followed by the print layout where Type and images are placed, and positioned on a metal plate.Ā Leading is done by using metal stripes with the desired width, while kerning, spacing is done while laying out the type.Ā Ā which is placed into the chase after which the printing process starts.Ā Paper is feed manually onto the gripper, and is again manually controlled to apply the print.Ā It was a good experience using the Letter Press. It felt strange controlling, and the timing was off, but it was the first time, but it is easy to get the rhythm with time.
Offset printing is a technique of transferring an inked image from plates to rubber blanket which is then printed by rollers.Ā The combination of the lithographic method in offset printing is based on the abhorrence of oil, and water.Ā This process uses flat image carriers to print the image from ink rollers while the non-printing area stay free from ink, being attracted by the water based film. It was only a brief introduction, but quite information, and a great opportunity to get in contact with some of the earlier modules of printing concepts.
