Once the printing labels had been settled, Luo Chong remembered the Roller Ink Printing Technique and Chinese Character Typewriter Bai Qi had proposed some time ago, so he asked about them.
"Right, what about that roller ink printing method you mentioned before, the one that uses wax paper as printing plates? And the Chinese character typewriter—have you made them yet?"
Upon hearing this, Bai Qi immediately reported, "Reporting to the Chieftain, the hand-cranked roller ink printing technique has already been developed, but the Chinese Character Typewriter still hasn't been completed."
"Oh? Tell me about it in detail." Luo Chong suddenly became interested.
"It's like this. I first saw the Hollow Wax Resist Dyeing Technique in the history of textile technology written by the First Wife, and that inspired me. That was how I thought of transferring this technique into the printing industry.
"At first, I conducted some experiments, directly carving hollow printing plates into paper and then printing through them. However, the results weren't good. Later, I discovered that carving hollow plates using brush-style characters didn't work, but directly engraving regular script onto wax paper produced surprisingly good results. So I had people specially make Iron Pens to write printing plates onto the wax paper.
"Printing this way worked well enough, and it was no longer necessary to pick out characters and arrange the type all over again every time a printing plate was made, as with Movable Type Printing. Nor did it require the manpower, materials, and time needed to carve wooden printing plates. To make a wax paper stencil, all that was needed was for someone to handwrite the content to be duplicated once.
"That was convenient, but it also had certain drawbacks. The quality of the printed characters depended entirely on the calligraphy of the person who