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History of writing
The development of civilizations cannot be imagined without writing, because it was with its help that knowledge was transferred from generation to generation, even despite wars and natural disasters.
The first letters, in the form familiar to us, appeared more than 5000 years ago. These were pictograms (graphic images of symbols) that the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians applied to stone, clay tablets, wood, and fabric. If initially each pictogram meant a specific object (man, tree, bird, sun), then later the Egyptians changed the letter, assigning each character its own sound. This was the beginning of hieroglyphic writing, which originated around 3100 BC.
At the same time, writing developed in Asian countries: China, Japan and Korea. The first hieroglyphs found on the territory of these countries date back to 1700 BC. With their help, both individual sounds/words and three-dimensional images/sensations were expressed. It is not surprising that with this approach, the same ancient Chinese alphabet consisted of several thousand characters, and only the intellectual strata of society could remember (and correctly use) them. For commoners, the letter remained inaccessible for a long time.
If we talk about the first alphabet in history, in the modern sense of the word, then it arose around 1700 BC in the Middle East. It included 30 symbols, each of which was assigned its own unique sound. Words were formed from symbols, and sentences were formed from words, which was fundamentally different from the Asian writing of those years.
History of printing
For many centuries, pictograms, hieroglyphs, and then letters were applied to the surface by hand: mechanically (on stone/clay) as well as ink and other coloring pigments (on papyrus/paper). They began to print them much later - already in our era.
The first printed text is officially considered to be a Korean treatise dated 704-751 AD. And in 953-993, printing was invented in China - the industrial production of books using woodcuts. Moreover, the famous xylographic copy of the "Diamond Sutra" was printed in China much earlier - in 868, but not by industrial means, but by hand.
In the West, the production of printed materials began much later - from 1425. During this period, paper became available to the masses: it was used to make religious prints, playing cards, and later full-fledged books.
In 1445, Johannes Gutenberg formalized the invention of printing by standardizing characters (letters) that were printed on metal plates and stored in separate cells. The ink was applied to them manually, after which prints were made on paper: first, one letter at a time, and then with combined plates that form whole words and phrases. Given the deep religiosity of medieval Europe, the first printed texts were, as expected, the Bible and the Psalter.
Originally, typography was done by hand and required a lot of painstaking work. The ink was not erased from the paper, and even one mistake made required a double sheet of text to be reprinted. To some extent, it was possible to simplify and automate the process only in the 17th century. Dutch printers began using wooden printing boards on which raised letters were carved. After that, liquid paint was applied to the letters, paper was leaned against them and rubbed with soft brushes. This technology was widespread both in the West and in the East, and was used in China until the 20th century.
The imprint of texts on copper, proposed in the 17th century, did not take root because of its complexity and high cost. Paper remained the main material for printed products. In order not to pore over each word separately, the printers made metal stamps with raised letters, from which not separate words/phrases were formed, but whole pages of text. All that remained was to cover them with paint and attach them to paper. This greatly accelerated the process and made the books not piece, but mass industrial products.
But there were also exceptional literary works that got into the mass press much earlier - back in the 15th century. We are talking about religious texts, including the 42-line Bible, which began to be replicated using the first printing presses back in 1466-1481. The list of countries that have become pioneers in this direction includes Holland, France, England and Poland. By the 19th century, printing presses were installed in all regions of the world, replacing handwritten and block printing.
With the development of digital technologies, the printing of texts has become commonplace and widely available. So, having a personal computer and a printer, today anyone can print a text: with typographical quality and in the shortest possible time. The main thing is to pre-prepare the text in digital form, edit it and eliminate all errors.
It is possible to compare two documents manually, but this is time-consuming and always involves the risk of omissions. Our service does not make mistakes and works very quickly - you get an instant and 100% result. The compared documents are not stored anywhere, which guarantees the confidentiality of information.
