Printing with movable type in China really didn’t work very well because of the number of character required. Instead of sorting through 100 or so, you might have tens of thousands; instead of alphabetical order, they had to be sorted by their rhymes and perhaps by the number of strokes they contained. Movable type really only works well with an alphabet.

But the revolution was when the Chinese and, later, Europeans, realized it would be more flexible to make symbols that you could assemble texts from. Moveable type. The ability to mass-produce books and other written material had a huge influence on society.

This is a misrepresentation of history. Yes, movable types were invented in China by Bi Sheng around 1040 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type). But their use was rather limited. The oldest book printed with movable types is only from 1377, over 300 years after the invention. So, no revolution. Books continued to be printed with the block-cutting technique for the next 900 years in China, until the late 19th century. Gutenbergs invention, by contrast, though being 400 years delayed compared to China, only took decades to spread across Europe. In fact, it took over so fast, we have a specific term for ‘books printed with movable type until 1500’: incunable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incunable). It is estimated that around 500,000 exemplars from those early days of printing survive, and this is from before printing really took off in the 1500s.

I know several artists who do just that. There is a process similar to the old DIY pcb process that removes everything from a printing plate but the inverse type faces. They then use those plates for platen printing.

As a kid we toured his house (mid-1970’s), and they had a machine on display. It was cool, and they mentioned it was a failure. The only other things I recall as a small room for a telephone (like a phone booth built into a wall) and his pool table.

A mechanism pushed them up until the line of type between the margins.

…until the line of type fit between the margins?

Btw, I wonder what happened when you needed even more space than the space bands provided?