For many years, printing is equal to letterpress. Asian artisans invented the technique, using individual letters made of clay. In Germany, Gutenberg developed the process using characters molded from lead. He assembled the characters into wooden trays, inked their surfaces, then pressed paper against them for transferring the image.

Nowadays, people are still using letterpress in many occasions, such as die cutting, foil stamping, embossing, numbering, scoring, perforating, and even printing simple images on napkins.