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The main stages of printing production

Modern printing technology includes three main stages, without which no printing house can do: prepress, press and postpress processes.

The prepress production process ends with the creation of an information carrier from which text, graphic and illustrative elements can be transferred to paper (printing form production).

The printing process, or printing proper, produces printed sheets. For their production, a printing machine and a carrier of information prepared for printing (printing form) are used.

At the third stage of the printing technology, called the post-printing process, the final processing and finishing of the sheets of paper (prints) printed in the printing machine are carried out to give the resulting printed products a marketable appearance (brochure, book, booklet, etc.).
Prepress process. At this stage, one or more (for multi-color products) printing plates for printing a certain type of work should be obtained.

If the print is single-color, then the form can be a sheet of plastic or metal (aluminum), on which a drawing is applied in a direct (readable) image. The surface of the offset form is processed in such a way that, despite the fact that the printing and non-printing elements are practically in the same plane, they perceive the ink applied to it selectively, providing an impression on paper when printing. If multi-color printing is required, then the number of printing forms must correspond to the number of printing inks, the image is preliminarily divided with the selection of individual colors or inks.

The basis of prepress processes is color separation. Extracting the constituent colors of a color photograph or other halftone drawing is a tricky job. To perform such complex printing work, electronic scanning systems, powerful computer and software, special output devices for photographic film or plate material, various auxiliary equipment, as well as the availability of highly qualified, trained specialists.

Such a prepress system costs at least 500 - 700 thousand dollars. Therefore, most often, in order to significantly reduce investments in the organization of printing houses, they resort to the services of special reproduction centers. They, having everything necessary to perform prepress work, prepare sets of color separations on order, from which sets of color separation printing plates can be made in a conventional printing house.
Printing process. Print form is the basis of the printing process. As already mentioned, offset printing is currently widespread in the printing industry, which, despite its almost
100 years of existence, constantly improving, remaining dominant in printing technology.

Offset printing is carried out on printing machines, the principle of operation of which was discussed above.

post-press process. The post-printing process consists of a number of important operations that give the printed prints a marketable appearance.

If sheet editions were printed, then they need to be trimmed and trimmed to certain formats. For these purposes, paper cutting equipment is used, ranging from manual cutters to high-performance cutting machines, designed to simultaneously cut hundreds of sheets of paper of all formats common in practice.

For sheet products, post-press processes end after cutting. The situation is more complicated with multi-sheet products. In order to bend the sheets of a magazine or a book, you need folding equipment on which folding takes place ( from him.false- bend) - sequential bending of printed sheets of a book, magazine, etc.

If you want to make a brochure or a book consisting of separate sheets from printed and cut into separate sheets of prints, they need to be matched one to the other. For this purpose, sheet-collecting equipment is used. When the selection is completed, a thick stack of crumbling sheets is obtained. In order for the sheets to be combined into a brochure or book, they must be stapled. Currently, the most widespread are 2 types of fastening - wire and seamless adhesive. Wire binding is mainly used for brochures, i.e. printed publications from 5 to 48 pages. For fastening with wire staples, booklet makers are used. These devices can be used alone or
in combination with collating systems. More complex work is performed on special wire stitching machines.

To fasten a large number of sheets, adhesive bonding is used, which is carried out either with the help of “cold” glue - polyvinyl acetate emulsion, or hot melt hot melt adhesive. The spine of the future book edition is smeared with glue, firmly holding the sheets until the glue dries completely. The advantages of this technology are good appearance books, the flexibility and stability of the book block, strength and durability.

In the work of small- and medium-circulation printing houses, there are similar processes. However, as the main printing equipment of these printing houses, not offset machines are used, but duplicators capable of reproducing both single-color and multi-color copies.

Review questions for the first topic

1. The main stages of the formation of printing equipment and technology.

2. Methods of modern printing.

3. Systems of large- and medium-circulation printing.

4. Systems of small-circulation printing.

5. The main stages of printing production.

Theme II
TECHNIQUE AND TECHNOLOGY PHOTOS

The formation of photographic equipment and technology

Photography is the theory and methods of obtaining a visible image of objects on light-sensitive photographic materials - silver halide (AgHal) and non-silver.

Photography originally arose as a way of capturing portraits or creating natural images, which took much less time than painting by an artist. The advent of cinema and color photography greatly increased its possibilities, and in the 20th century photography became one of the most important media of information and documentation. The variety of tasks solved with the help of photography allows us to consider it at the same time a section of science, technology and art.

The widespread use of photography in human life determines its diversity. There are photographs in black and white and color, artistic and scientific and technical (aerial photography, microphotography, x-ray, infrared, etc.), planar and volumetric. It is clear that any photographic image in itself is flat, and its three-dimensionality (in particular, in stereoscopic photography) is achieved by simultaneously shooting an object from two close points and then viewing two images at once (each of them with only one eye). Holography is a very special type of volumetric photography: here the method of recording optical information is different than in ordinary photography.

The origins of photography date back to the late 15th century, when artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, used the camera obscura to project an image onto paper or canvas, which they then sketched.

Photography in the proper sense of the word arose much later. More than three hundred years passed before information about the photosensitivity of certain substances appeared and methods arose for using and preserving changes in such substances under the action of light. Silver salts were discovered and studied among the first light-sensitive substances in the 18th century. In 1802, T. Wedgwood in Great Britain obtained an image on a layer of silver nitrate (AgNO 3), but could not fix it.

The birth date of photography is considered to be January 7, 1839, when the French physicist D.F. Arago (1786 - 1853) informed the Paris Academy of Sciences about the invention by the artist and inventor L.J.M. Daguerre (1787 - 1851) of a practically acceptable method of photography, which he called daguerreotype. However, this process was preceded by the experiments of the French inventor J.N. Niepce (1765 - 1833), associated with the search for ways to fix the image of objects obtained under the action of light. So, the first surviving print of the urban landscape, made with a camera obscura, was obtained by him as early as 1826. Niépce used a solution of asphalt in lavender oil as a light-sensitive layer applied to tin, copper or silver-plated plates. In 1827, he sent a "Note on Heliography" to the British Royal Society, in which he reported his invention, and samples of his work. In 1829, Niépce entered into an education treaty with Daguerre. commercial enterprise"Nieps - Daguerre" to work together to improve their method. Daguerre, continuing the development of Niepce, discovered in 1835 the ability of mercury vapor to show a latent image on an exposed iodized non-silver plate, and in 1837 he already recorded visible image. The difference in photosensitivity compared to the Niépce process using silver chloride was 1:120.

The heyday of daguerreotype dates back to the 40s - 60s of the 19th century. Almost simultaneously with Daguerre, another method of photography - calotype (talbotype) was reported by the English scientist U.G.F. Talbot (1800 - 1877). He began photographic experiments in 1834 and in 1835 he obtained a photograph using the "photogenic drawing" he had previously proposed. A patent for this method was issued in 1841. In January 1839, upon learning of Daguerre's invention, Talbot tried to prove his priority. His pamphlet A Report on the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or The Process By Which Natural Objects Can Be Depicted Without the Help of an Artist's Brush, was the world's first publication on photography (published
February 21, 1839). A significant disadvantage of "photogenic painting" was the long exposure.

The similarity between the Daguerre and Talbot methods was limited to the use of silver iodide as a photolayer. In the rest of the technology, the methods differed greatly: in the daguerreotype, a positive mirror-reflecting silver image was immediately obtained, which simplified the process, but made it impossible to obtain copies, and in the Talbot calotype, a negative was made,
with which it was possible to make any number of prints. Those. Talbot's method, representing a two-stage negative - positive sequence of the process, became the prototype of modern photography.

In the days of Niépce, Daguerre, and Talbot, the term "photography" did not yet exist. This concept gained the right to exist only in 1878, when it was included in the Dictionary of the French Academy. Most historians of photography believe that the term "photography" was first used by the Englishman J. Herschel on March 14, 1839. However, there is another opinion: for the first time this term was used by the German astronomer Johann von Madler (February 25, 1839.).

Along with the development of chemical - photographic processes, Daguerre, Talbot and other scientists worked on the creation and development of photographic apparatus. The first cameras developed by them were of considerable size and weight. Thus, L.Zh.M. Daguerra weighed over 50 kg. F. Talbot, using lenses with a shorter focal length, was able to make smaller cameras. The Frenchman A. Selye in 1839 designed a camera with a folding fur, as well as a tripod and a ball head for it, a light-protective awning, a packing box in which all the photographer's equipment was placed.

In 1841 in Germany, P.V.F. Feuchtländer made the first metal camera equipped with a fast lens by I. Petzval. Thus, the design of most cameras of that period was a box camera consisting of a box with a tube in which the lens was built in (focusing was done by extending the lens), or a camera consisting of two boxes moving one relative to the other (the lens was mounted on the front wall one of the boxes). The further evolution of photographic equipment for filming was associated with a wide interest in photography, which led to the development of a lighter and more transportable camera, called a road camera, as well as cameras of various types and designs.

Simultaneously with the modernization and improvement of photographic technology, the chemical technology of photography was also developing. Daguerreotype and talbotype are a thing of the past. In the 60s-70s of the 19th century, the wet collodion process, which was proposed in 1851 by the English sculptor F.S. Archer (1813 - 1857). Its essence was that a collodion solution containing potassium iodide was applied to a glass plate immediately before photographing. However, the low light sensitivity of the photo layer, the need to prepare it immediately before shooting, and the fact that such a plate could only be used in a wet state were significant drawbacks of the method, moreover, its use was limited to portrait work in pavilions.

Active developments to increase photosensitivity and create dry photolayers have led to the appearance of dry bromogelatin plates. This discovery was made by the English physician R.L. Maddox (1816 - 1902), who published in 1871 an article "An Experiment with Gelatin Bromide" on the use of gelatin instead of collodion as a binder for silver bromide. The introduction of dry silver bromide plates made it possible to divide the photography process into two stages: the production of photographic layers and the use of ready-made photographic materials to obtain negative and positive images.

The 80s marked the beginning of the period of development of modern photography. This was largely facilitated by obtaining photographic materials of sufficiently high sensitivity. Indeed, if with heliography the exposure was six hours, daguerreotype - thirty minutes, calotype - three minutes, wet collodion process - ten seconds, then with the use of silver bromide gelatin emulsion it decreased to 1/100 of a second.

An important role in the development of photography on silver halide photolayers was played by the discovery in 1873 by the German scientist G. Vogel (1834 - 1898) of optical sensitization ( from lat.sensibilis- sensitive). He found that the expansion of the spectral range of sensitivity of the layers can be achieved by introducing into them dyes that absorb light of longer wavelengths than silver halides, which are selectively sensitive only to blue, blue and violet rays, i.e. shortwave rays. Vogel showed that the addition of the yellow-red dye corallin to the emulsion resulted in an increase in sensitivity to green and yellow rays. Spectral sensitization allowed not only to improve the reproduction of colors when photographing, but also became a step in the development of color photography. Thus, by the end of the 19th century, fragile and heavy glass plates were replaced by photographic material on an elastic, light and transparent base, inert to chemicals.

American amateur photographer G.V. Goodwin (182 - 1900) became the inventor of photographic film. In 1887 he filed an application for the invention "Photographic film and the process of its production." The creation of photographic film, and then the development by J. Eastman (1854 - 1933) of a photography system using this photographic material, led to changes in the photographic industry, made photography accessible to the mass consumer, both technically and economically. This invention had a very great future. So,
By the 1970s, about 90% of all produced AgHal - photographic materials were photographic films. In the modern range of photographic materials, films are usually negative, papers are positive.

In modern photography, a variant of black and white photography on the AgHal layer, based on the “diffusion transfer” process, has also become widespread. In our country, this process is implemented in the Moment photosystem; abroad, such systems were first developed by Polaroid (USA). The system includes a large-format (frame size 9 x 12 cm) camera, a negative AgHal - photographic film, a multi-purpose processing solution, uniformly applied to the surface of the film when it is rewound in the camera immediately after exposure, and a receiving, positive layer, rolled to the developing negative layer when rewind. Due to the high viscosity of the solution, the processing process is practically dry and allows you to get, without removing the negative film from the camera, a ready-made dried print on the receiving layer in about a minute after shooting.

A special group of processes on AgHal - photolayers are the processes of color photography. Their initial stages are the same as in black and white photography, including the emergence of a latent image and its manifestation. However, the material of the final image is not developed silver, but a combination of three dyes, the formation and quantity of which in each area of the photolayer is controlled by developed silver, the silver itself is subsequently removed from the image. As in black and white photography, there are both a separate negative-positive process with printing of positives either on special color photographic paper or on film, and a direct positive process on inverted color photographs.
materials.

Color photography was a major step in the development of photographic technology. The first person who pointed out the possibility of using color reproduction in photography in 1861 was an English physicist.
J. K. Maxwell. Based on the three-component theory color vision, he suggested getting one or another given color. According to Maxwell, any multi-color picture can be subjected to color separation into blue, green and red ranges of the visible spectrum. Then, by additive synthesis, these beams could be projected onto a screen. The results of the experiments showed that, for example, light with a predominance of blue and green rays forms a blue color on the screen, blue and red rays - purple, green and red rays - yellow, blue, green and red rays of equal intensity when mixed give white color.

Color separation and additive synthesis (according to Maxwell) were carried out as follows. The object was filmed on three black and white negatives through blue, green and red glass. Then black-and-white positives were printed on a transparent basis and beams of the same color as the filters used during the shooting were passed through these positives, three partial (single-color) images were projected onto the screen, combining which along the contour a color image of the object was obtained. Additive processes found some use, for example, in early color films. However, due to the bulkiness of filming and projection cameras and the difficulty of combining partial images, they gradually lost their practical significance.

The so-called raster method turned out to be more convenient. Colored in blue, green and red, starch grains were applied to rasters, which were located between the glass or film and the light-sensitive layer. When shooting, the colored elements of the raster served as color-separating microlight filters, and in the positive image obtained by inversion, they served as color reproduction elements. The first raster photographic materials, the so-called autochromic plates, were produced in 1907 by the Lumiere company (France). However, due to the poor sharpness of the resulting images, insufficient brightness, a raster color photograph is already
in the 30s of the twentieth century, it gave way to methods based on the so-called subtractive principle of color synthesis.

These methods use the same principle of color separation as in additive processes, and color reproduction is carried out by subtracting primary colors from white light. This is achieved by mixing different amounts of dyes on a white or transparent basis, the colors of which are complementary to the main ones - yellow, purple, blue, respectively. So, by mixing magenta and cyan dyes, blue is obtained (purple subtracts green from white, and cyan subtracts red), yellow and magenta dyes - red, cyan and yellow - green. By mixing equal amounts of all three dyes, a black color is obtained. For the first time (1868–1869), the subtractive synthesis of color was carried out by the French inventor L. Ducos du Auron.

Subtractive processes on multilayer color photographic materials are the most widely used in modern amateur and professional cinema - photography and color printing. The first such materials were produced in 1935 by the American firm Eastman Kodak and in 1938 by the German firm Agfa. Color separation in them was achieved by selective absorption of primary colors by three light-sensitive silver halide layers placed on a single basis, and a color image was achieved as a result of the so-called color development using organic dyes, the foundations of which were laid by the German chemists B. Gomolka and R. Fischer in 1907 and 1912 respectively.

Color development is carried out with the help of special developers based on color developing substances, which, unlike black and white developing substances, not only convert silver halide into metallic silver, but also participate, together with the color components present in the emulsion layers, in the formation of organic dyes.

Along with the wide distribution of "silver" photographic materials
in photo production, silver-free technologies are also used, which are based on the use of photosensitive layers that do not contain halides or other silver compounds. They use photochemical processes in a substance dissolved in a binding medium, photoelectric processes on the surface of a thin layer of an electrified semiconductor, photochemical processes directly in polymer films and thin polycrystalline layers.

The advantage of silver-free photographic materials is one- or two-stage processing, a short time for obtaining an image on them, high resolution, low cost (4 times cheaper than black and white silver halide). The disadvantages of silver-free materials include low light sensitivity compared to silver halide photographic materials. Most of them are sensitive to light only
in the UV - region of the spectrum, they do not transmit halftones well. For this reason, they are not used for direct photography, and it is impossible or difficult to obtain color images on them. Nevertheless, silver-free photographic materials are used in microfilming, copying and duplicating documents, displaying information, and other areas.

Thus, the sequence of actions for obtaining a photograph includes several stages. The first stage consists in creating on the surface of the light-sensitive layer the illumination distribution corresponding to the image or signal. Under the action of light, chemical or physical changes occur in the photosensitive layer, which vary in strength in different parts of it. The intensity of these manifestations is determined by the exposure acting on each area of the photosensitive layer. The second stage is associated with the amplification of the changes that have occurred if they are too small for direct perception by the eye or device. At the third stage, the stabilization of the arisen or enhanced changes takes place, which allows you to save the received images or recordings of signals for a long time for viewing, analyzing, extracting information from the received image.

In the production of printed materials, the following stages can be distinguished: typing, reproduction of visual materials, layout, layout, transferring the image to the media (printing process), post-printing processes.

Consider how these processes have changed over time.

Kit. Starting from ancient times (China, VIII century AD) and until the XV century, the set was carried out by carving in stone slabs (lithography) or in wooden planks(woodcut) of the full text of the page, including the visual design. This method was labor intensive. Plates and boards quickly fell into disrepair, and therefore it was necessary to renew them.

With the invention of individual letters by I. Gutenberg, the nature of the set changed - now the laborious process of carving the text in stone or wood disappeared. The letters were metal, so they could withstand large print runs. Fundamentally, this process has not changed with the invention of the linotype. The text, previously typed on a typewriter, was again typed from the Linotype keyboard and turned into castings in the form of monolithic metal lines with a relief surface. Then these metal strings were inserted into the so-called. cash desk, and thus the image of the whole page was obtained.

The advent of computers fundamentally changed the typing process. Although it is carried out from the keyboard in the same way as with the help of the linotype, the further fate of the typed text is significantly different.

Reproduction of visual materials. The use of pictorial materials, apparently, began only in the early Middle Ages. And even then it was mostly initial letters, patterned screensavers. They were carved in stone or wood at the same time as the text.

With the invention of the printing press by I. Gutenberg, the input of pictorial materials took the form of manufacturing cliche. In the future, this form did not fundamentally change, only the technology for making clichés changed. They were cut out on metal plates on copying machines like a lathe, made by a photochemiographic method with further replication (plastic clichés).

Computer technology has made it possible to abandon clichés. Today, visual materials, whether they are page design elements, line, black and white or color photographs, are placed on the page of a publication on a computer during the layout process.

Prototyping. In the pre-computer era, processes prototyping and typesetting were divided. Layout is the process of compositionally placing drawing elements on a format. The end result is a layout. The latest layout signed for production is the original layout.

The layout took place in the editorial office.

Layout - this is the process of placing text and illustrative blocks on the format field, taking into account the layout design and spelling requirements. With the advent of computer technology, the process typesetting moved from the printing house to the editorial office and coincided in time with the process prototyping.

Transferring an image to paper (printing). By definition, printing is the process of transferring a coloring matter (printing ink, toner) from a printing plate to a substrate, usually paper.

Printing execution publications - the production of a material object using a number of printing processes: prepress, printing (high, flat, gravure or screen printing), stitching and binding and finishing. The level of printing performance of the publication largely determines its quality.

Printing ink is a heterogeneous colloidal system consisting of highly dispersed particles of pigments (lacquer pigments), evenly distributed and stabilized in the liquid phase of the binder.

Print form is the surface of a plate, slab or plate cylinder made from the most different materials(light-sensitive layer or photopolymer, metal, plastic, paper, wood, lithographic stone), which serves to form and save an image in the form of separate sections that perceive printing ink (printing elements) and not perceive it (blank elements). The ink from the printing elements should easily transfer to the printed material or to the transmission link, for example, to an offset sheet or a swab, so that the image is then transferred, as a rule, to paper.

The printing elements create an image on the printing plate. They perceive the ink and then transfer it to paper or to an intermediate link (offset cloth, swab), thus creating a colorful image on the print during the printing process.

Whitespace elements serve as a background for creating an image on a printed form. They do not accept ink and therefore do not transfer image elements to paper during the printing process.

The sharper and clearer the boundary between blank and printed elements, the better the printing form. The number of high-quality prints that can be obtained in the printing process before these boundaries are blurred (destroyed) is defined in printing as the print run resistance of the printing plate.

Depending on the arrangement of printed and blank elements on the printing plate, four main printing methods can be distinguished: tall, flat (offset), deep and screen.

post-press processes. These include stitching processes- colliding sheets, cutting, folding, stacking blocks, binding notebooks, wrapping covers, trimming and finishing processes - varnishing of prints, lamination, foil stamping, stamping (figurative die-cutting).

Test questions:

What did Chinese artisan Bi Sheng invent?

Who invented the first printing press?

Who first began printing Slavic books in the Cyrillic alphabet?

Why is Ivan Fedorov famous?

What is lithography?

What is woodcut?

What is an incunabula?

Who Invented the Linotype?

What is the linotype for?

What is the difference between layout and layout processes?

What is a printable?

What does the post press process include?

Prepress

The production process of printed products is divided into three stages: pre-press, printing processes and post-press processing.

Pre-press preparation covers the stages of work, starting from the idea of design, preparation of text information, graphic originals and graphics, and ending with the production of ready-made printing forms that are used to print the circulation.

The content and professional graphic design of printed materials are also the basis for publications in the field of electronic media, such as Internet homepages or in CD ROM format. Therefore, in addition to the concept of "prepress processes", the concept of pre-media preparation appeared - premedio. This term refers to the digital preparation of text and images suitable for output to any final storage medium. As shown in fig. 1-1, the actual pre-press processes may be preceded by a pre-media preparation stage.

Prepress processes have undergone significant changes due to the transition from traditional to digital technologies. Nevertheless, during a short transitional stage, the photoform as a carrier of information is still used by many enterprises. The book describes both prepress technologies and traditional prepress processes.

Set Technology

The initial information for the set is the author's manuscript. The unambiguity and absence of errors in the text are more important than the formal and aesthetic aspects of its design. Necessary proofreading is best done when preparing the manuscript. For the purpose of unification, the correction must be carried out in accordance with the instructions governing it (for example, in accordance with DIN 16511 or ISO 5776).

Entering text is the first step in the kit production process (Section 1.1). Increasingly, this work is done by the author. Since the hardware and software for processing text data on a computer is very diverse, a printing house may face the problem of compatibility of data arrays obtained from different sources. So printing companies should have a large number of programs (import filters) to convert documents coming in different digital formats into a form acceptable for further processing. After entering the text, its processing follows, which implements the design features specified by the layout, such as choosing the font and its size, line lengths, windows for the subsequent inclusion of illustrations, etc. . Features of the layout are set by the author and the publisher or agreed jointly by the author, the publisher and the printing house.

After processing, text output follows (Section 1.2). Decorated text blocks are displayed on film or paper. In this form, they are subject to imposition, i.e., they are combined with halftone images and graphics, and, as a result, imposition stripes are obtained. If the layout of text and graphic information is performed by electronic means, then the finished strip is displayed on film or paper. The digital strip data is a necessary starting point for further output processes, such as computer-photoform, computer-printing and DI digital printing, etc., or for use in electronic media.

Correcting an exposed set is a laborious and costly process and should be avoided whenever possible. For this reason, in the process of work, before the text is output to photographic films, plate material or printed in a digital machine, proofreading is repeatedly performed by printing digitally processed text on paper. Author's proofreading is carried out in proofs delivered to the author. After the proofreading, the layout of the strips follows. The correct placement of illustrations, the location of captions, the presence of footnotes, links to other pages, headers and footers and columns are the main subject of the proofreading process during layout.

Manuscript

In the classical sense, a manuscript is a handwritten text that, in a printed form, should appear on a print. The fewer errors in the manuscript and the more clearly it is written, the faster and more error-free the subsequent input by the operator of its content from the keyboard can occur. The author must hand over the manuscript to the printing house in finished form. After that, no significant additional changes should be made to the content.

Today's software tools allow for a variety of text preparation and processing. With their help, it is easy to type tables, graphs, figures into text. With the help of software tools, good results in text manipulation can be achieved by non-professionals, which for the most part are authors. Currently, the printing house receives printouts of the text on paper and media with its electronic version.

Entering text

At an enterprise or organization that produces printed materials (most often in a publishing house or in a prepress department), before typesetting, the manuscript first goes to proofreading. At this stage, the necessary corrections are made in the manuscript, as well as technical guidelines for typesetting are added, font sizes are determined for the body text, headings, emphasis, footnotes and installation instructions regarding illustration insertions, paragraph indents, etc.

At the stage of text input, it is converted into digital data in the computer. Text entry is performed primarily from the keyboard, but also through OCR technology (optical reading) or, less commonly, through speech input.

Keyboard input

Text is entered using the keyboard as infinite text until the end of a paragraph or the appropriate typeface. Row splitting is not performed at first. This creates a prerequisite for automatic "justification" of the text, which means receiving lines in the form of segments of a given length. In addition, the text in the proofreading process can automatically "flow", i.e. the line, starting from the corrected place, is switched off and then will correspond to the specified format. The process goes all the way to the end of the paragraph. The keyboard used to enter text is part of the peripheral equipment of computers.

Today, one of the most commonly used input and word processing programs is Microsoft Word. With its help, the texts typed and stored on the data carrier can then be used without any problems in technological process. Other packages are also known, such as Word Perfect and Macintosh Word. For typing scientific texts with formulas and special characters, especially suitable software products TEX.

Instructions for the design of the text should be limited in the manuscript to the characteristics of headings, paragraphs, the order of illustrations, if they are placed in a certain place in the text, as well as the necessary markup for the beginning of a new page (preferably on the right).

The author can transfer the text to a publisher or printer via a data network (for example, via e-mail via the ISDN network). This saves time and increases the relevance of information. Communications serve mainly for communication between the author and the publisher. To do this, data formats, protocols and interaction interfaces are defined.

Optical input (OCR)

With the help of OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition - optical character recognition), the text presented in handwritten or typewritten form is converted into digital form and thus becomes suitable for processing. First, in the "display process" of a document on paper, it is entered by optoelectronic reading systems. The document appears as a bitmap. In the future, the bit structure of the sign is converted into a text code.

During the reading process, the document is scanned and described by a certain matrix structure. The brightness and color values of each dot of the matrix are recorded in digital form. Black and white documents are described by one bit of information per image point when they are scanned. When scanning color originals in 4 colors, up to 32 bits per dot must be used. The resolution of the scanning devices determines how closely the scanned image matches the original. For most text originals, a resolution of 300 dpi allows for high reliability of character recognition when using OCR processes (type size starting at about 4 mm, depending on the legibility of the font elements). Illustrations and text in small size fonts require a reading resolution of 600 dpi. For digital representation of an image, the TIFF (Tagged-Image File Format) format is usually used. The OCR process covers 5 steps:

identification of text and illustration blocks with the exception of the latter;

recognition of a sign by analyzing its shape and comparing it with the characteristic features of the standard; word identification using arrays of dictionaries;

correction of unrecognized words or characters by displaying them on the screen with confirmation or correction by the operator;

formatting data in one of the output formats, such as ASCII, Word, RTF, or PDF, and writing data for saving (data formats).

As a result of using the OCR method, textual information is converted into digital data suitable for subsequent computer processing, like text entered from a keyboard.

OCR technology is most often used to recognize typewritten author's originals, to create databases of reprinted books available only in the form of previous editions. The error rate of OCR equipment is less than 1%. If the original is dirty, the characters are poorly printed, or there are spots on the original, the number of errors increases. In such cases, keyboard input may be more effective. The criteria for choosing one or another recognition method are the fonts of the original, the required recognition speed, the volume and quality of the dictionary, the data formats used and, of course, the price. Currently common OCR software products are, for example, Omni-PagePro (Caere Corp.), Optopus (Makrolog GmbH), Adobe Capture (Adobe Systems).

Modern printing technology includes three main stages, without which no printing house can do: prepress, press and postpress processes.

The prepress production process ends with the creation of an information carrier from which text, graphic and illustrative elements can be transferred to paper (printing form production).

The printing process, or printing proper, produces printed sheets. For their production, a printing machine and a carrier of information prepared for printing (printing form) are used.

Prepress process. At this stage, one or more (for multi-color products) printing plates for printing a certain type of work should be obtained.

Printing process. The printing plate is the basis of the printing process. As already mentioned, offset printing is currently widespread in the printing industry, which, despite its almost
100 years of existence, constantly improving, remaining dominant in printing technology.

Offset printing is carried out on printing machines, the principle of operation of which was discussed above.

post-press process. The post-printing process consists of a number of important operations that give the printed prints a marketable appearance.

For sheet products, post-press processes end after cutting. The situation is more complicated with multi-sheet products. In order to bend the sheets of a magazine or a book, you need folding equipment on which folding takes place ( from him. falzen - bend) - sequential bending of printed sheets of a book, magazine, etc.

To fasten a large number of sheets, adhesive bonding is used, which is carried out either with the help of “cold” glue - polyvinyl acetate emulsion, or hot melt hot melt adhesive. The spine of the future book edition is smeared with glue, firmly holding the sheets until the glue dries completely. The advantages of this technology are the good appearance of the book, the flexibility and stability of the book block, strength and durability.