CTP Plate Making: Development Direction of Offset Printing Carton Making

In recent years, the application of CTP plate making technology in carton production has become more and more extensive. It has become an important way for carton printing enterprises to shorten the plate making production cycle, control production costs, increase production efficiency and product quality. Although the advantages of the CTP plate making process are indisputable, at present, there are indeed some problems that need to be addressed by corresponding control measures, so as to inject new vitality into the production of preprinted carton.

Application trend

The use of film-on-sun is a method of platemaking adopted by most carton printers. However, film materials are now expensive. For carton products with a wide web and large film consumption area, the cost is considerable. In addition, the film-making process will cause some obstacles to the implementation of green printing, affecting the competitiveness of cartons printing companies. Under such a background, the CTP platemaking, which combines both cost advantages and environmental advantages, will naturally become the development direction of the offset printing carton plate making.

With the continuous deepening of the understanding of the production cost control in the carton printing industry, the application of the CTP platemaking process is set to show a trend of increasing unabated. However, when developing the CTP plate making process, we should also see some issues that cannot be ignored in the CTP plate making process, such as relatively high prices of plate materials, expensive parts of the plate making equipment, and unskilled or attitudes due to operator's operating techniques. The problem of high plate-making error rate caused by not being serious, and the poor stability of reprinted printing quality due to the unstable quality of the printing plate, etc., have yet to be further improved and improved. Therefore, for carton printing companies, the CTP plate making process should not be blindly followed. We must carefully weigh the pros and cons according to the factory's production scale, production adaptability, and technical capabilities, and appropriately develop the plate making process suitable for the actual conditions of the factory. The equipment comes in the best use.

There is a problem

According to the circumstances of the company's company's production of the CTP version, and some customer-owned CTP versions, the most common problem is the imposition of the wrong operation or part of the layout of the output garbled, which will lead to the plate does not meet the quality requirements And scrapped. The author thinks that there are mainly the following points: the imposition of the imposition of the plate-making staff and the inexperience of the operating techniques of the plate-making staff; the unfamiliarity with the imposition software and the plate-making equipment; the computer configuration and the file format do not match; the conversion of the file requiring the transfer is ignored; Understand the printing process and the post-printing process; make-up and plate-making operations careless; did not seriously shut down the quality of the good imposition.

In fact, many CTP plate-making quality accidents are caused by the lack of skilled operation skills of plate-making personnel, lack of professional knowledge and operational experience. Therefore, the CTP plate-making staff is actually a very important element in the plate-making process. In addition to having the basic qualities of patience and carefulness, it is also necessary to be familiar with the connection and use of computers and other special equipment, and have basic file management and output. Skills of issuing and dispatching; Skilled use of plate-making related equipment and independent completion of imposition work; Mastering relevant software installation methods and related parameter settings; Grasping the basic knowledge of typesetting specifications and typesetting software; Familiar with various imposition software, understanding and mastering each Problems such as file format and operation are apt to appear inadvertently, so as to better avoid imposition and output failure.

Imposition operation

Mastering the characteristics of the product and rationally making impositions according to the adaptability of the printing and post-press technical control can meet the requirements of improving production efficiency and product quality.

Before the imposition, you should first understand the process characteristics, finished product specifications, paper specifications, and main features of the product. For multiple specifications, multiple layouts of small color box together to print a set of printing layout, should try to match the color of the layout in the longitudinal position of the printed sheet, which will help to accurately adjust the color of the printing layout, reduce the appearance of color. For layouts that require precision overprinting, they should be as far apart as possible in the direction of the bite and pull tabs. This can improve the overprint accuracy of the layout. For areas where there are precise overprinting requirements, consideration should be given to trapping overprinted parts. For example, according to the accuracy of the printing machine, the characteristics of the substrate, and the layout of the layout, the outline of the light-colored layout may be enlarged by 0.05 to 0.3 mm as appropriate. Dew defects appear on the edge of the overlay. For the combined layout of the netted layout and the physical layout overlay, it is better to properly expand the edge of the textured layout.