Traditionally, black-and-white line art plates are produced from black-ink originals or high-quality printed materials through photography, retouching, copying, and layout (or assembling). This method produces films that meet printing requirements but has a long production cycle, high costs, and complex operations when combining text and images. It also requires a darkroom, which many small and medium-sized printing shops do not possess.
2. Small Offset Plate-Making
For small print runs with lower quality requirements (e.g., compiled documents), small offset printing is often used. Plates are typically made by directly copying onto a paper-based zinc oxide plate using a photocopier. This method has low cost (an 8-page sheet costs only a few yuan), but the number of prints is limited, the print quality is not very strong, and the photocopier’s toner cartridge must be relatively new to achieve standard small offset results.
3. Modern Plate-Making
For large print runs requiring high quality, scanners, computers, layout software, and laser printers can be used to produce high-quality plates.
Equipment Selection
Scanner: Flatbed black-and-white or color scanners, e.g., Tsinghua Uniscan 4A color scanner with interpolated resolution up to 4800 dpi.
Computer: 486-class or higher.
Layout Software: WYSIWYG Chinese PageMaker 5.0 or Founder Fit integrated layout software.
Laser Printer: 600 dpi HP series models.
Common Plate-Making Methods ① Text-dominated documents with some black-and-white line art: Scan the document into the computer, convert the text using Tsinghua Uniscan OCR 5.0 for Chinese and English, re-layout and merge with line art, proofread, and output via laser printer. ② Line-art-dominated documents: Scan the line art and adjust contrast in scanning software for optimal results. Use layout software to handle text (including translation and overlay), proofread, and output to tracing paper. This method is especially convenient for translated children’s comics. ③ Ordinary black-ink originals: Scan into the computer, retouch and edit with graphic software, merge with text, and output to tracing paper via laser printer.
