The White Falcon - 16.08.1974, Síða 4

Print shop presses bring you
What you are reading right now was a narrow col-
umn of typed paper stuck by adhesive wax to a lay-
out sheet Tuesday night, and black rectangles
marked the places where you now see photos.
Turning those layout sheets into a printed news-
paper is one job of the base print shop.
Most people probably think of printing in terms
of Gutenberg's moveable type. While a good amount
of work is still done by some variation of that
technique, the modem tendency, especially in busi-
ness printing, is toward offset lithography. That
is the printing method used to produce The White
Falcon.
The process starts Wednesday. Using a gargan-
tuan, immovable camera, a Navy Lithographer photo-
graphs each layout sheet, or "dummy" on a piece of
lithographic film as large as the page you're read-
ing. The image is 20 percent smaller than the
original.
Each photo must also be "shot" with the big cam-
era, often at a different amount of enlargement or
reduction from the page dummies. This enables us
to put, say, a four by five inch picture into a
much smaller amount of space in the paper.
Photos must also be "screened" or broken into
dots for reproduction. This is done by placing a
plastic sheet covered with unifrom transparent dots
in front of the litho film before the photo is cop-
ied. These screened photos are called "halftones"
in print shop lingo. Everything else is called
"line copy."
The next step is stripping. The negatives of
pages are cemented to yellow plastic sheets and
holes are cut in the plastic to allow them to show
through.
The halftones are cemented in
over the transparent "windows"
formed by the black rectangles on
the dummies we mentioned earlier.
(Remember: these are negatives.
Black areas appear transparent.)
The marks that shouldn't be
there—stray line, rectangles
where a correction has been past-
ed in, etc.—are removed by
"opaquing." A liquid is brushed
on to cover the mistake.
The negatives are now ready to
be "burned" onto the plates. A
yellow sheet is placed on top of
a sensitized sheet of aluminum on
a special table. The lithogra-
pher lowers a sheet of glass over
it and clamps it down. A com-
pressor sucks the air out between
the glass and the tabletop to en-
sure a perfect contact. The
"burning" consists of exposing
Top, SN Ronald Sorg develops a sheet of film. Above, SN George
Lamonica opaques stray lines out of a negative.
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The White Falcon