This is the most common form of commercial printing. Some printing presses are sheet fed, meaning that they print single sheets of paper very rapidly. Other presses are web fed, which means that they are fed from a roll of paper which is usually cut into individual sheets after printing. There are advantages to each form of printing. There is a greater variety of papers commonly available in sheets as opposed to rolls.
Web presses run faster than sheet-fed presses but they generally are more tedious to set up.
This makes them more economical for long runs than for short runs. Sheet-fed printing also has a reputation for being a higher quality process. This is because the majority of web presses around are set up for things like newspapers where the chief concern is speed rather than quality. There are many web presses that are set up to do high quality, high-speed printing. When a printing press is not set up to perfect, after one side of the paper is printed, the press operator must re-stack the paper in the press and run it through again to print the other side.