One set of initials that turns up on occasion in the context of wide-format printing is AEC. It stands for “architecture, engineering, and construction,” and in general refers what can broadly be called “technical printing.” Like many terms in the graphic arts, ask any 10 people what “technical printing” means and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. For our purposes here, we’re going to use the term to refer to the types of print applications in demand among those producing architectural, engineering, and/or construction images and documents. These can include designs for a new office building, individual floor plans for each floor in a new proposed building, individual plumbing or electrical diagrams, plans for a new highway or other roadway, residential construction, and so forth. Oil companies produce well logs to track the geology of where they are drilling, which is anther variety of technical printing.

Technical printing also encompasses mapping applications, and another acronym one encounters often is GIS, or “geographic information system.” Technical printing may not seem like the sexiest of wide-format applications, but if you read our story about Rapid Digital Press last December, it can be a highly profitable niche. It’s important to understand, however, what the technical requirements are and what the prevailing trends in the technical printing space are. As with just about every other print market, technical printing has been changing and changing dramatically—in predictable as well as unpredictable ways.

“Technical printing is orientated around any kind of structural design,” said Sal Sheikh, Vice President, Large Format Systems for Canon Solutions America (CSA). CSA has a number of hardware and solutions for the technical printing markets, including the ColorWave series of printers as well Direct Print scan-and-print document digitization software,. “It can be a commercial building, a house, a road, a bridge, a tunnel. That’s how we define it: technical documentation to support some kind of a design/building process.”