Completely ignore one or more spot colors

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

It is often necessary to ignore certain spot separations in jobs, usually for technical separations such as die or cut lines when generating the final print for production.

One approach is to simply add them to SeparationColorNames or CompositeColorNames but omit them from the SeparationColorOrder or CompositeColorOrder arrays in the page device. That works well when the job has been correctly prepared, and those separations are all set to overprint. But if they were accidentally left to knock out, just omitting the spot separation leaves a white line in the real graphics.

You can configure Harlequin to completely ignore the spots instead, so that they don’t knock out of underlying graphics, even if they were not set to overprint.

This is managed with a NamedColor resource named IgnoredSpots. All spot names listed in this resource are mapped to the None separation and therefore completely ignored when rendering the page. The resource is shipped with the RIP, but with no spot names associated so that it is not initially match any colors from the job. The following calls in the HqnColorDatabase ProcSet can be used to manage spot names to be ignored.

The changes made by these calls are subject to save/restore.

AddToIgnoredSpots – This call is available from v12.0r2 onwards. Reads an array of spot color names (each as a name or string object) and adds them into the IgnoreSpots named color database. It also inserts the IgnoreSpots NamedColor resource into the active NamedColor array, as managed using setinterceptcolorspace; for example.:

[ /Cut /Dieline ] /HqnColorDatabase /ProcSet findresource /AddToIgnoredSpots get exec

Spot names are matched in a case-sensitive way (that is, if you need to match both “Cut” and “cut”, you must add both to the database). This means that the same method can be used for spot names in all scripts and encodings.

The AddToIgnoredSpots procedure calls setpagedevice internally. This means that you must call it before any graphics have been drawn on the current page.

DeleteFromIgnoredSpots – This call is available from v12.0r2 onwards. Reads an array of spot names (each as a name or string object) and removes them from the IgnoredSpots named color database; for example:

[ /Cut ] /HqnColorDatabase /ProcSet findresource /DeleteFromIgnoredSpots get exec

If any of the spot names supplied are not present in the IgnoredSpots named color database, they are silently ignored; no error is raised.

The DeleteFromIgnoredSpots procedure calls setpagedevice internally. This means that you must call it before any graphics have been drawn on the current page.

ListIgnoredSpots – This call is available from v12.0r2 onwards. It takes no arguments and returns an array listing the spot names currently in the IgnoreSpots named color database; for example:

/HqnColorDatabase /ProcSet findresource /ListIgnoredSpots get exec

might return:

[ /Cut /Dieline ]

In HHR, an example call is also provided in the ExampleIgnoreSpots page feature, which is described in Harlequin Technical Note Hqn100: A guide to technical resources for HHR.