Some ink materials, such as phase-change or gel inks, may benefit from curing during the printing process. Curing may be accomplished in many ways. One method involves exposing the freshly-printed ink to radiation, such as ultraviolet (UV) light or other actinic radiation. Another approach would involve heat ‘curing’ or essentially just allowing the ink to cool and solidify.
Phase-change inks such as gel-based inks are substantially solvent free and therefore enable fast printing speeds because drying of the printed image is not required. Moreover, those inks can be printed onto a wide variety of surfaces because the ink solidifies upon surface impact due to the lower temperature of the print surface. The ink shows little de-wetting or spreading on a variety of print surfaces. However, these inks may have a high profile on the page, which in turn can cause problems as the print media upon which these inks are deposited move through the printing system. Further, their high viscosity on the print surface may result in the ink not spreading correctly in turn resulting in images having undesirable artifacts.
Therefore, these inks generally benefit from pressing or leveling the ink to lower the ink profile on the page, as well as spreading and filling in the printed features. While this is an added step in the printing process, it does correct some of the issues with regard to spreading and leveling the image. It is also possible to combine the leveling and curing processes, as disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/331,076, filed Dec. 9, 2008, abandoned Aug. 17, 2011. In this approach another surface is pressed onto the image during the curing process, achieving both leveling and curing simultaneously.