Flow chart of movable type printing

The flow of movable type printing is illustrated as follows:

1, making blanks: make blanks with consistent specifications from collodion, and carve a single character on one end with the height of the character stroke protruding like the thickness of the edge of a coin, and then harden it with fire to make it into a single collodion movable character. When encountering uncommon and remote characters, if there is no preparation beforehand, they can be used as they are made.

2, storage: the production of blanks sorted in a wooden grid, labeled with a strip of paper.

3, typesetting: typesetting, with a frame of the iron plate as a base, above a layer of turpentine, wax and paper ash mixture made of chemicals, and then the need for the gum clay living word picked out one by one row into the frame. Row full of a frame will become a version, and then baked with fire, such as the agent slightly melted, with a flat plate to the word flat, the agent cooled and solidified, it will become a version of the type.

4, printing: printing, as long as the ink on the plate type, covered with paper, add a certain pressure on the line. In order to be able to print continuously, it is used two iron plates, a version of the brush, another version of the typography, the two versions alternately.

Extended information:

Bisheng and movable-type printing:

Bisheng was the inventor of movable-type printing, more than 400 years before the German Gutenberg invented movable-type printing on metal.

Bi Sheng was a man of cloth, and his family was not well off. When he was 12 or 13 years old, he was apprenticed to a bookshop in Hangzhou. This bookshop was a private workshop, the owner was a bookseller, mainly engraving, printing and selling books.

During his apprenticeship, Bisheng learned how to print books by hand and mastered the basic techniques of engraving. He realized that engraving had one of the biggest drawbacks: every time a book needed to be printed, the plate maker would need to re-engrave the plate once.