Donald Thompson
The new digital technologies make the printers manage jobs, more accurate and productive and offer lower prices to customers. From printing and cutting to packaging and shipping in recent decades, technology has allowed significant advances in automation and the improvement of these processes.
To better understand how these innovations work, we follow the process of some orders for products from the moment they are printed to the moment they leave the printing factory (โรงพิมพ์, which is the term in Thai) to go home.
Digital Printing
The advantages of digital technology are traditionally the low start-up costs and the possibility of conveniently printing even only one copy, or another minimal quota of a graphic product. This makes digital technology very convenient for printing magazines and paperbacks, like books or catalogs that don’t need large runs. For this reason, digital technology has also opened the way for printing on-demand; that is, a copy of a book can be printed only when it has been sold.
One of the most used technologies at industrial printing level is HP Indigo digital printing; a kind of printing defined as digital offset and that has the typical satisfactions of digital printing, along with optimal print quality.
Manufacturing A Book With Milled Binding
However, we use new technology for the realization of milled binding. On the side of the printed sheets, a Data matrix code is applied, a kind of QR code that contains all the information of the printed product to be made. The code is read by the machine, which in this way cuts, picks, mills and glue the leaves to the cover according to the information communicated by the matrix. Thus, the binding is executed automatically, without moving from one machine to another and without having to reconfigure each time, the parameters of the different devices. In this case too, productivity increases, and errors decreases.
Also, at this critical moment, digitalization and new technologies help to improve productivity and quality.
Thomas
