At present, most negative working lithographic plates use organic solvents as a developing medium. These developers have the obvious disadvantages of toxicity, fire risk, and are more expensive than the aqueous developers. This work describes the synthesis and characterization of materials that have similar photoactive properties to existing materials, but are soluble in water or aqueous medium rather than organic solvents. These materials are terpolymers comprising of one sort of material to induce water solubility, such as methacrylic acid (MAA) and another material to give the photoactive response such as glycidyl methacrylate (GMA). The tertiary-butyl-4-vinyl phenyl carbonate (t-BOCVP) was added as a chemically amplifying agent. Various terpolymers were prepared via free-radical solution polymerization, typically in methyl ethyl ketone (MEK). Crosslinking reaction was induced using mixed arylsulphonium hexafluoroantimonate (MAS+ -SbF6-) as a photogenerating acid. It was found that the films of the terpolymer containing 85 mol % of GMA unit with the addition of 5 mol % rather than 2 met % of the t-BOCVP in the feed ratio gave good acid resistance and good adhesion to the surface of the zinc plate. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.