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D41-14 Supplementary report on graphic arts
Daily Life on UMMO-14 [ VCEU-14 ]
Specialists on Earth in typography, photomechanical reproduction, reprography and print runs may be surprised that we attach so little importance to printed matter.
The approach is incorrect: In the first place it is not true that techniques of reproduction on a sheet support (WE NEVER USE CELLULOSE PULP) have been abandoned, as we shall see later. On the other hand, consider that if, at our level of civilization, we had to depend on printed documentary records as you still do, we Men of UMMO would have died “suffocated” under an immense heap of mountains of printed paper.
In practice, while we remain in our XAABII (HOME), a room we call phonetically UULODAASAABII, provided with an enormous spheroidal (HEMISPHERICAL) screen, serves as a viewer for any document we wish to read. With the advantage that many drawn diagrams can be viewed stereoscopically. A UUGEE (CHILD) can thus study a series of polyhedral geometric shapes, really seeing them in space instead of making do with simple two-dimensional projections, so that his eidetic-stereo-spatial tendencies are trained.
But naturally we are not always inside our dwellings. Nor is it convenient for us to carry the units provided with a UEIN GAA EIMII (IMAGE DISPLAY SCREEN), which replaces our UULODA SAABII units on our journeys. It is then that we may really need the printed text, the printed three-dimensional photograph, the graph, drawing or diagram, plan or map, numerical tables, nomographic charts, etc., etc.
Auxiliary units called GAA OBEE act as transducers, converting the coded information stored in the XANMOO into a printed image (LEGIBLE CHARACTERS, PHOTOGRAPHS OR DRAWINGS AND DIAGRAMS).
But the life of these printed documents is ephemeral. Perhaps shorter than that of the newspapers you read. As soon as they have been used, and to avoid storing sterile material which, moreover, can easily be reproduced again, it is destroyed by dissolving it in a suitable mixture of acids.
As you see, the way the problem of reproducing printed documents is posed in our world differs from the way earthlings have solved it.
When you need to set the text of a book, the compositor takes the type from the type case, making up the forme in his galley to print it at last, with the help of a simple platen press or a flatbed press that first inks the forme by means of a suitable roller. The sheet of cellulose paper has taken up the shape of the typographic character by transfer of the greasy ink.
Or, to automate the process further, you will resort to a linotype, in which a set of matrices and a casting device advantageously replace hand composition and even automatic monotype equipment.
If, on the other hand, you wish to reproduce a photograph or drawing, you will resort to photomechanical processes in “halftone” or “line” photoengraving respectively, photographing the image onto a sensitized zinc plate and, in the first case, using screens, to obtain by acid etching a block or a set of blocks (if you want, for example, the colour printing of a four-colour process).
At other times, to reproduce images, you will make a metallized stencil whose fine perforations, obtained with electronic equipment, will allow printing by means of a duplicator, or else you will sensitize a selenium plate by means of high electrostatic potentials (A PROCESS VERY SIMILAR TO OUR OLD METHODS ON UMMO), as you do in xerographic photocopiers.
Or you will have various similar methods such as photolithography, photogravure, thermoplastic processes or electrostatic ink-projection printing, photostatic printing by means of a cathode-ray tube for typesetting (which is the latest process devised by earthlings that we know of), etc. etc.
Precisely this enormous range of processes, extending from the old making of a plate for copperplate engraving, aquatint and lithography to the modern photolithographic films, has been superseded by us through a single universal process of reproduction.
It is natural that at the present level of earthly technology you should need as many printing techniques as the visualization needs of the men of your planet demand. You will not be able to satisfy with the same machine, for example, embossed stamping, an advertising poster in bright inks (obtained by screen printing), the delicate screens of an offset three-colour print, or road markings with reflective paints.
The basis of our document reproduction process is totally different: Any technician in the graphic arts will understand it perfectly, and in a coming continuation of this same supplementary report we shall describe it briefly. Clearly the present state of science and technology on your planet will not allow it to be put into practice, but it could serve as a guide, as we suggested to Doctor Hubert Suter of the German Federal Republic in a report (which that gentleman later commented on sarcastically), for the future planning of earthly reprographic techniques.
UMMO TECHNIQUE OF STEREOSCOPIC VISION.
NOTE 2.
We use various processes to fix on a rigid or flexible sheet an image that can be viewed stereoscopically. The UULAYA NAI DEE is not the most recent, but it requires a more elementary technology.
Because it has a different basis from the processes you currently use on EARTH to obtain the effects of polychrome relief photography (GAUFRE system, holograms, anaglyphs, polarized light, etc. ), we shall describe it to you briefly.
ENLARGED IMAGE NOT TO SCALE
On a rigid or elastic polymer base 
a thin transparent, viscous film is deposited, in which fine microscopic discs, called by us UULIBOO DEE (calibre of the order of 8 earth microns), are held in suspension.
The UULIBOO DEE are prepared by complex technological processes unknown to you. They are metal oxide crystals that are prepared by magnetizing them in two different ways: 
so that, once incorporated in the viscous film and subjected to a strong magnetic field, 50% are oriented in one direction and the rest in another (See image).
These microdiscs can be sensitized electrostatically for 172 different shades of colour, covering practically the visible spectrum.
The sheet thus prepared can be exposed with the two images of a stereoscopic pair. All the UULIBOO 
record one of them, which can then be observed at the viewing distance only by the separate eye. 
The discs 
on the other hand become less perceptible to that eye, being oriented almost tangentially to the lines of sight leaving its crystalline lens.
The effects achieved with this system are surpassed by you only with holograms. We have other systems capable of projecting three-dimensional images into a gaseous or empty space.
