Color format control keys

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.

The page device can be affected by configurations reported by output plugins and by PostScript code. (PostScript code can also affect ProcessColorModel [RB2].) For the RIP, the following keys are the preferred way of controlling separations and other aspects of output formats and the now-removed use of Tones.

An output device, or more strictly the raster back end or plugin driving that device, describes a number of different configurations it can support in terms of its “colorant attributes”.

Some of these attributes are needed because the RIP can always separate jobs even to a composite device. Mostly though, each colorant attribute set corresponds one-to-one with rasterFormats supplied by the plugin. Each raster format has an index (counting from zero and determined by the order in which the raster formats are obtained from the plugin). This index is relevant to the plugin only; PostScript code should not change it.

The RIP is set up using the keys in the page device dictionary. See pagedevice keys.