Dots of gum?

Another thing I've been thinking about lately is this idea that gum
sticks better in difficult situations, such as white on black or
printing on glass, if one uses a half-tone or stochastic dot negative.
Because the assertion was made recently that a negative that prints
discrete dots will print better on glass, I grabbed one of my old laser
printer negatives, which is very definitely made of discrete dots, to
try when I was experimenting with printing on glass. I can't say that
the dot negative printed better than an inkjet negative, or perhaps it
would be more useful to say the inkjet negative didn't print any worse
than the laser printer negative. I suppose as far as that goes they
both use discrete dots, it's just that the laser printer dots are
farther apart.

But I realized that something isn't making sense to me about this. The
argument has always run this way: somehow these discrete dots of gum
that are laid down by halftone or stochastic dot negatives stick to the
substrate better than gum that's not laid down this way. But here's the
problem I have with this argument: since it's the negative that is made
of discrete dots, what prints on the gum isn't the discrete dots. What
prints is the space around the dots. So I don't get this argument; could
someone make this work for me?
Katharine
Received on Sat Feb 12 11:36:24 2005