Wire Marking and Its Effect upon Print-through Perception of Newsprint

The goal of this study was to gain a better understanding of the wire mark peak pattern which is visible on the reverse side of printed newsprint grades and contributes to print-through perception. To quantify the wire mark pattern we have created an automatic routine that detects the wire mark peak in a 2D-FFT power spectrum and measures different characteristics of the wire mark peak pattern. Even though the wire mark pattern on the printed side leads to uneven ink pigment penetration over 50% of the paper thickness for 42g/m2 grammage sheets, this uneven ink penetration was not detected on the reverse side of the print.