Задание 1.8 Write a short summary of the text.

Методические рекомендации:

Выполнение заданий к тексту требует его общего понимания. Контроль понимания достигается через выполнения этих упражнений. Информация, извлеченная при прочтении текста, может быть использована студентами в последующих заданиях.

Рекомендуемая литература: 1 осн. [12-15], 4 осн. [25-30]

Контрольные вопросы:

1. Explain the term “frequency of publication”.

2. What are the typical clients for periodicals printing?

3. Which group of printed products can be made of paper, cardboard, plastic, metal, glass?

4. What type of printing was the dominant printing technology for books for over 500 years?

5. What was the precursor of the newspaper in the sixteenth century?

Тема 2: Prepress

Задание 2.1 Read the text and give the main idea:

The process of producing printed products can be divided into three parts: prepress, printing (press), and print finishing (postpress). Printed products are graphic products in the widest sense: books and brochures, newspapers and magazines, leaflets and posters, labels and stickers, stamps and securities, credit and check cards, as well as folding cartons and blister packs, bags and pouches, beakers and tins, paper plates and lanterns, paper tissues, beer mats, mailings, and much more.

Prepress includes all the processing steps required to go from the preparation of the text, original images and graphics as well as the design concept right up to the production of the ready-for-print master; the master (printing plate) is then employed at the printing stage to produce the job. The informational content and professional typographic/graphic design of printed products are also a useful starting point for publications in the field of electronic media even outside print media, such as homepages on the Internet or CD-ROMs containing text and pictures. In a wider sense, therefore, “prepress” is also referred to as “pre-media”, meaning the preparation of text and image for the several publication media. As can be seen in figure 1, the premedia production stage may already be incorporated in the actual prepress stage. A fundamental technological change has taken place within prepress.

The use of conventional typesetting machines, repro cameras, and film has been replaced by computer technology in virtually all branches of this industry. Text and image are digitized or actually created digitally, processed electronically and output directly onto the printing plate in print format, and increasingly without the use of film intermediates.

Figure 1 – The production of film and printing plate within the process chain for producing print media

Nevertheless, for many companies film remains an indispensable information carrier, albeit for a short-term transitional phase. The distinguishing factor between them is the way the films are used: all technological variations where individual films are used for the page or print sheet composition and require conventional, mechanical/manual film assembly processes, and do not therefore employ digital full-page film exposure systems, are dealt with under the category “conventional prepress.” The section “digital prepress” outlines the processes of digital image processing, computer to plate, computer to film, and so on. Gutenberg’s invention of movable metallic type (1440), their production and the letterset printing press not only revolutionized the education system by enabling mass production of printed products, it provided at the same time the impetus for a series of diverse solutions to the general problem of converting text, images and layout as efficiently as possible into a printing master in order to be able to produce quality printed products more and more economically and up to the minute – which has continued up to the present day.

Machines that mechanized and automated the typesetting process with letterpress type – such as “monotype” and “linotype” – are just as much milestones in this chain of development as is the invention of lithography by Senefelder in around 1800, which released an impressive amount of development potential and led to modern high performance offset printing.

The worldwide dominant position of offset printing compared to other printing processes was made possible to a considerable extent by the efficient production of offset plates and the outstanding print quality achievable on a wide variety of substrates.

The first step in producing a printing plate is the creation of the masters/film copies for the printing plates (fig. 1). Film copies contain all of the information to be printed on the printed sheet corresponding to each color, but also opaque black-and-white originals especially for single-color work. In contrast to the digital production of masters where text and image processing are carried out at the same time, in conventional prepress text creation and image processing are carried out separately.

Photomechanical processes are used in image processing, predominantly for line art images (graphics), but still also for continuous-tone images, an area which is increasingly being replaced by digital processes. Typesetting is carried out without exception on (desktop publishing) computers (e.g., Apple Macintosh, IBM compatible PCs) in combination with powerful software and automated imaging systems to produce the text film masters. Text and image are combined in assembly processes (cutting, positioning, pasting, etc.) to produce the film copy.

Задание 2.2 Match the words with appropriate synonyms:

Задание 2.3 Find the following word combinations in the text:

1. доминирующее положение во всем мире

2. печатная форма

3. информационное содержание

4. фотомеханические процессы

5. штриховое изображение

6. полутоновое изображение

Задание 2.4 Discuss these questions in pairs:

1. Describe the main steps of the conventional production of film and printing plate

2. Describe digital prepress technology