or relief printing or typographic printing
In commercial printing , process by which many copies are produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper .
Letterpress is the oldest traditional printing technique, the only important one from the time of lithography (late 18th century) and especially offset printing (early 20th century). The ink-bearing surface for a page of text was originally assembled letter by letter and line by line. The Monotype and Linotype were the first keyboard-activated typesetting machines. Letterpress can produce high-quality work at high speed, but requires much time to prepare and adjust the press. For the sake of speed, newspapers are now printed by the offset process.