Waterless printing represents a specialized printing technology, which offers many economic and environmental benefits for high quality printing. Waterless printing plates reside in the core of this unique printing technology. Recent advancement in computer-to-plate technologies spurred a series of research and development activities in the computer-to-waterless plate (CTWP) area. This paper is intended to review various technical approaches to CTWP. The reviewed CTWP approaches include thermal ablation of silicone covered composite coatings, thermally sensitive contact masks on photosensitive waterless plates, and recently developed non-ablative techniques.
Jianbing Huang, "Technology Overview on Computer-to-Waterless Plates (CTWP)" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies (NIP15), 1999, pp 213 - 216, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.1999.15.1.art00055_1