German inventor and craftsman Johannes Gutenberg died #OTD in 1468.
His early printing process, and what texts he printed with movable type, are not known in great detail. His later Bibles were printed in such a way as to have required large quantities of type, some estimates suggesting as many as 100,000 individual sorts. In the following decades, punches and copper matrices became standardized in the rapidly disseminating printing presses across Europe. via @wikipedia
Found this place pretty much by chance, but it was really interesting. It gives a great idea of the challenges of printing Japanese before advent of the computer age and desktop publishing (one needs to select from more than 2,500 characters!). We also did a fun hands-on experience printing color on a bookmark with a manual letterpress, and had coffee decorated with topical latte art.
This was a fun (and slightly frustrating) project I did back in 2014/2015 around the idea of digital fabrication to create letterpress pieces to print posters in a DIY fashion.
(I declared it "not a failure" because I learned a lot in the process.)
(And before anyone asks, yeah, I tried it through GNOME/the graphical settings app. This is the only thing that worked, using a legacy driver that I had to scroll though a list of thousands of entries to find in a – thank fuck it exists – legacy web interface from what looks like circa 1993, which I’m informed is not going to exist for much longer.)
Scribus, the free and open source page layout application (think Adobe InDesign) just had a big new release. I'd love to hear some real world usage stories by graphic arts/desktop publishing professionals that use Scribus on a regular basis. My time in that industry was so long ago QuarkXPress was the most popular page layout platform.
I suspect that the introduction of moveable type to Germany greatly contributed to both witchcraft panics and anti-Jewish pogroms.
Even before the first actual, regular newspaper was published in 1604, Germany was rife with "news sheets" that printed all sorts of lurid and fantastical tales in order to increase sales. Think of modern-day tabloids or FOX News at their worst. And all those tales must be true, or else they wouldn't have been printed, right?
Some of the tales are rather amusing (like the Sankt Andreasberg cat that gave birth to 300 kittens and a goat in a single night while under the influence of a comet). But then there's a tale of a Jew who supposedly tried to "torture" blessed altar bread and, when he could not destroy it "with fire or water", he tried to "bake it into a cake". And then the dough became red, and he beheld a vision of Baby Jesus within the oven...
Such tales took on lives of their own, and helped keep all sorts of bigotries alive. Just like modern-day social media do...
(By the way, if anyone can give me some recommendations for scholarly works on the early era of mass printing, I am all ears - so far, I've mainly picked up individual anecdotes.) #printing#witchcraft#antisemitism#history
Had some issues with #printing these, I think the ink was too cold so I'm going to keep it upstairs where it's warmer and try again tomorrow because I want 50 of these things and it won't work if it keeps getting fouled and I need to clean it.
Can someone tell me if i have this right.
There is no such thing as a CMYK monitor is there. I mean i know you can profile a monitor or software or calibrate them to best approximate cmyk. But as far as i know, tech wise, all monitors are essentially rgb.
Or am i missing something, a graphic designer mentioned to someone they could get a cmyk monitor to match prints.
is this some niche printing industry monitor im not aware of?
#How-to #PDF#printing with predefined print parameters?
I am running #Linux with #KDE Plasma and do some printing (stickers, zines and such). Currently I am using #Okular for that, and I have to set printing parameters every time: number of copies, page size, margins, scaling, paper type and source, etc..
What I would like to have is a set of print "modes" I could apply to any given pdf or graphic file and have it printed in a standard way. I can even stretch my competences and write a shell script, if I know what utility to use.
Satisfying visually and tactile-wise, bookplates are also catnip for those like me who relish puzzling out who might have read the book in hand (or listened to the old record on turntable).
I hate 2D printers, how is it after decades these machines still can’t be reliable. This one is not even 3 years old! Now giving me tons of issues. My 3D printer is more reliable, if I could 3D print documents at this point I would do it just because I seem to have less issues. Do I need to buy another one already? I like print 30 pages a month at most. 🤦♂️