What is a Flex Edition?

Gravure printing and flexographic printing are both used to print plastic products, and they are named according to different plate-making materials. Gravure printing, also known as electro-engraving, is to engrave the design draft on a cylindrical steel cylinder and then put it on a plastic printing machine. The plate-making material of flexographic printing is a printing type that uses flexographic printing products, using water-based ink and UV ink. Flexographic printing is a direct printing method, which uses elastic raised image printing plates. The printing plate sticks to the printing plate cylinder. The printing plate is inked by engraved metal anilox roller. Because of its great elasticity, flexographic printing can transfer liquid or grease ink to almost all types of materials. Flexographic printing is a kind of light pressure brush. According to the characteristics of flexographic printing, we should choose the manuscript suitable for flexographic printing: we should design various patterns suitable for flexographic printing, such as lines and color blocks, and spot colors are better. Too small words and lines (especially the requirements of highlighting white) are difficult to achieve, and should be avoided when setting Liu. The design should avoid strict registration requirements. We should also consider the characteristics of the printing machine and whether the ink can make the manuscript authentic. Half-tone manuscripts should avoid designing and selecting large-area high-gloss manuscripts and pictures. The size of the manuscript should avoid high-magnification reduction and enlargement, because these will cause the loss of hierarchy.

Flexographic printing has various sizes and thicknesses, which can adapt to various inks, solvents and printing conditions. The stable base resin sheet can ensure the printing registration accuracy. The flexible resin version used for corrugated box printing includes DRC version of DuPont Company in the United States, nyloflex FAC-X version of BASF Company in Germany, and Co-prosperity in Japan. In the process of flexographic direct plate making, firstly, the infrared laser emitted by the image generator of the direct plate making machine ablates the black absorption layer of the graphic part, exposing the photosensitive resin layer below. After exposure, the general digital flexography can be developed by conventional methods, that is, solvent washing, drying and finishing. With the decrease of laser imagesetter and film consumption and the rapid increase of film price in recent years, more and more label printing enterprises began to consider investing in embossing direct plate making. Both the traditional plate-making process of relief printing and the direct plate-making process of relief printing include main exposure plate washing, drying and post-treatment. The biggest difference between them is the plate and the main exposure stage. In the process of gravure printing, as long as the black film is ablated by laser, the underlying photosensitive resin layer is exposed, and then the image can be formed by main exposure.