How Your Magazine is Made: Printing

To capture the key stages of how your copy of TCE is manufactured, Adam Duckett hot-footed it to Precision Colour Printing armed with a camera and a whole host of questions

I’VE VISITED my fair share of industrial sites, factories, and process plants. From BASF’s behemoth Ludwigshafen chemicals complex to the renowned chocolate factory in Bournville. There was Ford’s production lines in Michigan and the otherworldly vitrified storage site at Sellafield. They all have their industrial charms.

Yet nothing has made me quite as giddy (nerd alert!) as walking through a factory in Telford watching a continuous ribbon of crisp white paper transform into the magazine we had finished writing and designing just hours before. 

Plate line

The process of turning a PDF file of pages into a physical magazine starts in the factory’s plate line where computer-to-plate imaging technology uses lasers to transfer the page designs on to aluminium sheets.

The aluminium plate has a light-sensitive coating. It passes through an image-setter machine where a laser “burns” on the design for eight pages.

Paper delivery

The paper used for the inside pages of the magazine comes in huge rolls – just like a toilet roll but so large they have to be moved by truck from the paper store to the heatset web press.

Each of the aluminium plates have been attached to cylinders in the printing press. The inks only adhere to the portions of the plate etched with the design for the text and pictures. These plates don’t directly touch the paper. Instead, they transfer ink on to rubber-coated blanket cylinders that print the page designs on to the ribbon of paper passing between them (see Figure 1).

The cylinders rotate continuously, repeatedly printing the same eight-page section on the top and another on the underside of the unspooling paper. One set of cylinders applies the black ink top and bottom, and then the next applies cyan, then magenta, and finally yellow, layering up the design as it goes.

The inks are pumped in from colour-coded silos, each with a 10 t capacity.

Once printed, the paper passes through an oven that directs hot air onto the paper and flashes off the solvent. It then snakes over a series of increasingly chilled rollers to solidify the ink.

The paper is folded over a triangular former known as a kite and passes through a knife box that cuts the printed ribbon into its individual 16-page sections, which exit on a conveyor belt for inspection.

Quality control

The startup stage of the process involves the printers checking the quality and adjusting the parameters in preparation for the full production run. They calibrate the tension of the cylinders, ensuring the layering of the four coloured inks are correctly aligned to create sharp images.

If you peer through a magnifying glass at a photo in TCE you’ll see the individual, coloured dots that make up the image.

In some printed publications (hopefully not TCE!) you might spot a blue, magenta or yellow “halo” around a photo. This is because the colours were misaligned.

Once the printer is happy that the press is correctly calibrated, the “final” printing process begins.

Covers printed in batch

The covers are printed on a separate sheet-fed press designed to handle thicker paper stock. Rather than a continuous ribbon, single sheets of thicker paper pass through the press one by one.

It all comes together

In the bindery, the 16-page sheets are cut into folded four-page sections that make up a magazine. Imagine your magazine opened to its centrefold and draped over a moving washing line. The four-page sections are dropped in sequence onto the conveyor, collating the issue as it goes. The cover section is added last, and this continuous stream of “loose” magazines passes through a stitcher, which adds two staples, and a trimmer to cut off the excess paper.

Voila – your magazine is now complete.