THE days of ink-stained fingers and clunking of huge printing machinery may be behind us, but it has been replaced by nimble hands on computers and the whirring of streamlined production equipment.

APN Print has a piece of the Southern Downs history - it operated along with the Daily News at the original site on Palmerin St (now Bryson's Place) in 1919.

The business was moved to Albion St in 1980 where it stayed for decades.

In early 2010, APN Print tripled their printing capacity when they relocated to the "old" woollen mills at Kenilworth St after two years of negotiation.

The company invested heavily in the site, providing a first class facility for its employees.

Today, APN Print are still going strong, operating 24-hours, six-days-a-week and performing all stages of the printing process.

Print manager Allan Ruhle said magazines were now the main publications that were printed on site.

"We use about 120 tonnes of paper and 380kg of each ink colour per week," he said.

"I love what I do because the pace is always fast - every day is a different challenge."

APN Print produces between 60 and 80 publications per week.

Their largest order is the Unique Cars magazine, which requires three B-double trucks and 70 tonnes of paper.

The whole printing process starts off with a digital file zooming around as binary code which is sent through email or downloaded from a server.

The pre press team is on hand for the first stage of the printing process, and supervisor Brian Smith said their job was to prepare the file for being physically printed on the machines.

"We check if it is print ready, if all fonts are embedded in the file and there is no corruption," he said.

"We make sure that everything is there.

"It is an art, reproducing thousands of quality copies from one original."

Mr Smith said the team used software which could zoom in on the nitty gritty of the image.

"Printing is made up of little dots, and each dot forms lines," he said.

"The finer the quality image is, the more lines there are and you are less likely to see it by eye.

"We use 175 lines per inch - so for each physical inch on the paper, there are 175 lines of colour."

The whole pre press production includes electronic transactions as a series of processes.

Basically, the four colours of printing (black, cyan, magenta, yellow) are broken down and built back up again by specialised software.

The data is then used by a laser, which burns the desired image on to an aluminium plate.

Oil and water is used to make the ink stick, in patterns of non-image (white space) and image.

Mr Smith has been in the printing industry for 30 years, and said things had definitely changed since he was an apprentice.

"In those days you had to go to a photo lab and get a normal positive developed in a darkroom," he said.

"There were huge scanning machines, and you would cellotape the film on to a glass tube.

"It would spin round and round and burn all the different colours on to the film.

"It was a process which took four days but with modern technology it can now take a few hours."

The next step after pre press is the printing process.

Operations manager Roger O'Brien said there were two different production floors at the APN site - one for printing and folding, and the other for finishing.

"We have about three pressers and six folders on the first floor," he said.

"The second floor includes the stock; it is not easy to ship from Brisbane all the time so we store it here.

"The sheets are all sorts of thicknesses and different sizes, from 64g gloss to 350g board.

"I would say our most popular stock is the 73 or 80gsm."

On the printing floor, the Heidelberg Speedmaster 10-colour press is one of the larger machines that dominate the room.

It prints four colours on one side of a sheet - black, cyan, magenta and yellow - then flips the sheet over to do the other side.

"It can print about 1200 sheets per hour, we use a soy-based ink," Mr O'Brien said.

"To give the product a bit of a lift, we can also add high gloss aqueous coating."

To give an idea of the massive amount of materials needed to print a property Domain for example, production will need to include

eight sections and use about 240,000 A1 sheets of paper.

From there, the stacks of paper are left to dry for about three hours after printing.

They are then folded, stapled and trimmed in a process called stitching.

More than 10,000 sheets of paper can be folded per hour in APN Print's machine, and the staples come from two 90kg rolls of wire which are replaced as they run out.

Putting the book together is the next step, which is monitored closely to ensure all the pages go in the right place.

"We have a lot of quality assurance measures in place to make sure everything runs smoothly," Mr O'Brien said.

"We do quality checks every 1000 to 2000 booklets."

But peel your eyes away long enough from the whizzing and whirring of the production line, and you would see something pretty special set up in the back corner of the floor.

The machine is called a perfect binder and is the star of the production works, with Warwick the only APN site which owns one.

Instead of stapling books, the machine uses glue to hard-bind pages together.

"The biggest job we had was probably 600 pages," Mr O'Brien said.

"The gathering line gets all the books together in the right page number order, and then another section grabs the book and holds it in place.

"There are two different processes - burst or perfect bound.

"The saw takes the spine off while the book is held in position, then you feed in the cover.

"It is like a carousel, the covers come up underneath and then the book goes through the glue pot.

"It glues the hinge and spine, the cover gets stuck on and then the whole thing falls on to the conveyer belt."

The glue is applied at 220 degrees and is given time to cool before being fed into a three-way trimmer.

A cross strapping machine is then used to secure the bundles of publications.

"Our biggest thing is the presentation of pallets," Mr O'Brien said.

"When it goes out to a client you want it to look special."

With so many machinery, hot glue and trimmers around, there is a definite emphasis on health and safety at the APN Print site.

They employ about 60 staff locally.