The way printing showed up in our life is block printing, and the earliest region is from China, appeared in Han Dynasty. The technology of block printing was mostly applied to paper while it was used on cloth in Egypt. The greatest improvement of the printing can be movable type, which was invented by Bi Shang around 10th century. But it was not been used widely because of the complexity of Chinese character. In 14th century, the printing techniques like blocking printing and movable printing were commonly used. Compare to the printing machines nowadays, the most similar way to print in ancient time include offset press in 19th century and screenprinting in 20th century. Both of the methods apply ink while printing, and they are all highly related to the idea of color printing.
Nowadays, the printing methods are various and most of them have to do with ink. Take screen printing for example, with the use of the screen printers, the printing work can be versatile. Compare to the traditional printers, the surface of your original work can be avoided from pressure. And the different inks can also be applied to work with different materials. This is also one of the reasons why the screen printing is employed widely in various industries.
However, there is a printing way for specific usages, that is, hot stamping. It is a dry printing method which combines the heat, dwell time, pressure and stripping time to control the quality of the stamps. The components for the hot stamping process include foil roll leaf and substrate. The foil roll leaf is made up of a series of coating as ink during the operation, waited to be transferred by the heated die forces the foil transfer to the substrate. The foil is usually made of thin polyester film material that can be transferred to substrate when the heat and pressure is enough to transfer. Usually, the thinner the film carriers are, the faster the foil will transfer.
(movable printing, invented by Bi Shang)
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