Continuous tone and color printers

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

The Harlequin RIP is capable of producing rasters in a variety of formats, suitable for delivery to most monochrome and color printers or displays, either directly or with some manipulation.

There are several main groups of raster formats:

• Halftone, or single-bit, most appropriate for film recorders, imagesetters, laser printers and single-bit file formats.
• Continuous tone (contone), or multi-bit, typical of color photocopiers, dye-sublimation printers, computer monitors, and multi-bit file formats. These formats are characterized by: the color(s) of the output, the number of bits per pixel, the order of the colors, and the method of interleaving the data.
• Run-length encoded spans, which can save space at high resolutions.

In Core RIP systems, the raster is delivered through band callbacks to the OEM’s code; in HMR, it is wrapped up in the protocol understood by plugins.