The printing press*** has gone through several major stages, and what are their distinctive features?

Printing with movable type

Printing with movable type avoids the shortcomings of engraved plates, as long as enough individual movable type is prepared in advance, it can be assembled at any time, greatly speeding up the time of making plates. After the printing of movable type plate, you can dismantle the plate, movable type can be reused, and movable type than the space occupied by the engraved plate is small, easy to store and keep. In this way, the superiority of movable type is shown.

In 1041~1048 AD, Bisheng, a commoner, used collodion to make characters, one character for one print, and burned it hard with fire to make it ceramic. Platting first prepare a piece of iron plate, iron plate relaxed incense, wax, paper ash and other mixtures, iron plate surrounded by an iron frame, in the iron frame full of words to be printed print, full is a version. Then baked with fire, the mixture melted, and the living word block into one, while hot, with a flat plate in the living word on the pressure, so that the word surface is flat. Can then be printed. With this method, print two or three talk about what efficiency, if the number of prints more, dozens of books to thousands of books, the efficiency is very high. In order to improve efficiency commonly used two iron plate, a printing, a typeface. After a piece of printing, another piece of row, so that the alternate use, high efficiency. Commonly used words such as "the", "also" and other words, each made more than 20 words, in order to prepare for a version of the repetition of the use. There is no preparation for remote characters, it is temporarily carved out, with grass and wood fire immediately burned into. Removed from the printing plate of the word, are put into the same word in a small wooden grid, outside the label labeled by rhyme classification, in order to retrieve. Bi Sheng initially used wood as living words, experiments found that the wood grain is not uniform, easy to swell and deform in contact with water, and adhesive cement is not easy to go down, before switching to mastic.

Bisheng's invention of movable type printing improved the efficiency of printing. However, his invention did not receive much attention from the rulers and society at that time, and after his death, movable type printing was still not popularized. The collodion movable type he created was also not preserved. But the movable type printing technology he invented was passed on.

In 1965, a copy of the Buddhist Sutra on Immeasurable Life was found in the White Elephant Pagoda in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, which was identified as a movable-type text from Yuanfu to Chongning (1100~1103) in the Northern Song Dynasty. This is the earliest historical testimony of Bisheng's movable-type printing technology.