Printing is a process for production of texts and images, typically with ink on paper using a printing press. It is often carried out as a large-scale industrial process, and is an essential part of publishing and transaction printing.

Block printing in China

Woodblock printing on paper, whereby individual sheets were pressed against wooden blocks with the text and illustrations carved into them, was first recorded in China in the Tang Dynasty, although as a method for printing patterns on cloth the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220 , and from Egypt to the 6th or 7th centuries.

In the Tang Dynasty, a Chinese writer named Fenzhi first mentioned in his book "Yuan Xian San Ji" that the woodblock was used to print Buddhist scripture during the Zhenguan years (627~649 A.D.). The oldest known surviving printed work is a woodblock-printed Buddhist scripture in Chinese of Wu Zetian period (684~705 A.D.); discovered in Tubofan, Xinjiang province, China in 1906, it is now stored in a calligraphy museum in Tokyo, Japan. The oldest surviving documented printed book, a copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, is dated 848 AD, but a recent excavation at a Korean pagoda may have unearthed an even earlier Buddhist text dating to AD 750-751. In the modern Chinese historiography, printing is considered one of the Four Great Inventions of ancient China.

In a memorial to the throne in 1023, Northern Song Dynasty China, it recorded that the central government at that time used copperplate to print the paper money also the copper-block to print the numbers and characters on the money, nowadays we can find these shadows from the Song paper money. Later in the Jin Dynasty, people used the same but more developed technique to print paper money and formal official documents, the typical example of this kind of movable copper-block printing is a printed "check" of Jin Dynasty in the year of 1215.

Block printing in Europe

Block printing came to Christian Europe as a method for printing on cloth, where it was common by 1300. Images printed on cloth for religious purposes could be quite large and elaborate, and when paper became relatively easily available, around 1400, the medium transferred very quickly to small woodcut religious images and playing cards printed on paper. These prints were produced in very large numbers from about 1425 onwards.

Around the mid-century, block-books, woodcut books with both text and images, usually carved in the same block, emerged as a cheaper alternative to manuscripts and books printed with moveable type. These were all short heavily illustrated works, the bestsellers of the day, repeated in many different block-book versions: the Ars moriendi and the Biblia pauperum were the most common. There is still some controversy among scholars as to whether their introduction preceded or, the majority view, followed the introduction of movable type, with the range of estimated dates being between about 1440-1460.

The volume of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China dealing with Paper and printing has a chapter that suggests that "European block printers must not only have seen Chinese samples, but perhaps had been taught by missionaries or others who had learned these un-European methods from Chinese printers during their residence in China.", but he also admitted that the "only evidence of European printing transmitted from China is a lack of counterevidence".