Gravure Printing Glossary: 16 Terms for Flexible Packaging Teams

In gravure printing, production teams use a specialized set of terms in daily communication. What do these terms actually mean? The following 16 entries explain them one by one.

Printing: a process in which image and text information from an original is transferred and made to adhere to a substrate by using a printing plate or another method.

Substrate: any material that can accept ink or take up colorant and display image and text.

Printing plate: an image and text carrier that transfers ink to the substrate. It normally falls into four categories: relief, gravure, planographic, and porous.

Doctor blade: a steel blade on a gravure press that scrapes excess ink from the cylinder surface.

Doctor blade angle: the angle between the doctor blade's scraping face and the cylinder tangent at the scraping point; it is measured in the cross-section through that point perpendicular to the axis center line.

Doctor blade streak: a black line caused by the doctor blade and appearing along the cylinder's rotation direction; it is one type of gravure printing fault.

Dot: the pixel unit that forms a halftone image and reproduces the original's tonal range by changing dot area or ink volume.

Register: in two-color or multi-color printing, the ability of each separated plate image to achieve and maintain accurate positional alignment.

Register marks: cross and corner lines placed at the edge of the printing plate, serving as the reference for plate mounting and registration inspection.

Direct printing: a method in which the image and text on the plate are transferred straight onto the substrate surface.

Indirect printing: a method in which ink from the plate's patterns and characters is passed through an intermediate carrier before it reaches the substrate surface.

Printing pressure: the interacting force between the pressed bodies during printing.

Misregistration: the error in overlapping impressions during color printing.

Dry plate: ink in the cells, after the doctor blade and before transfer to the substrate, dries partly or completely, so the printed pattern cannot be reproduced fully.

Plugged plate: for some reason, the cells on the plate cylinder become fully or partly blocked, preventing sufficient ink pickup and making the impression lighter or even absent.

Plate run length: the maximum number of impressions a single printing plate can produce within the specified quality range.

Source note: This article is republished from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-378476.html