Flexographic printing, originally known as aniline printing, was not developed because of the toxic inks it used. Since then, the ink factory has been officially renamed flexographic printing by using recognized and acceptable pigments. In contrast to other printing methods that are capable of printing fine patterns, primitive flexographic printing is often defined as synonymous with low-quality printing.
After the mid-seventies, due to the progress of the material industry, especially the advent of polymer resin plates and cermet anilox rollers, the development of flexographic printing has made a qualitative leap. The text and pictures on the original manuscript are computerized into films, so that more detailed text and lines, and even graphic design printing using dot reproduction, can be achieved by flexographic printing. At that time, corrugated boxes were mainly made of 6.34 mm thick plates, and the reproducibility of dots was mainly 65 ppi or less, and most of them were used for monochrome dot designs. In addition, not only corrugated boxes, but also paper bags, labels, film printing and other fields are also improving. With the joint development of printing equipment, inks, plates, and other manufacturers, it is possible to achieve high-definition color printing of 175 lpi using a plate with a thickness of 1.14 mm.
In the mid-90s, with the advancement of laser engraving technology, BARCO (now ESKO) and DuPont took the lead in jointly developing laser engraving flexoplate, compared with the traditional flexographic plate that used film sheets, laser engraving flexographic can achieve fine dots and fine line text that traditional flexographic printing can not achieve, and at the same time, the color gamut of printing is wider, making flexographic printing can also be comparable to offset printing/gravure printing methods such as high-definition color printing.