Delivery and format of the output data

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; and to Harlequin MultiRIP but not Harlequin Core

The RIP sends output data (or raster data ) to the plugin with the D_OUTPUT and D_IDLE selectors. The data is sent in chunks, called bands .

The pagebuffer has a packing unit in bits, which is exposed to the plugin as a parameter (in the pageHeader structure). The PackingUnit value tells you how many bits the raster is packed to regardless of the color format. For half tones it will be 32‐bit or 64‐bit depending on platform. For contone output it depends on the bit depth and the color mode It will be the same as PackingUnit in the pageHeader structure.

Note: If accessing bytes of scanline data with a byte pointer, remember that on a little‐endian architecture, byte addresses will be at the low‐order byte of a word.

All bands in a page use the same raster format. The format information is in a rasterFormat structure. A pointer to this can be found in the pageHeader structure, in turn pointed to by a field of the deviceDefinition structure passed with all output plugin selector calls. See The rasterFormat structure for details of rasterFormat .

At startup, the RIP asks the plugin to tell it which raster formats it supports for each “device” in the plugin. (If the RIP cannot obtain valid rasterFormat information from the plugin the device is not instantiated.) It asks for this with the D_GET_RASTER_FORMAT selector. The plugin returns data about the formats it accepts in the rasterFormat structure passed with D_GET_RASTER_FORMAT . See D_GET_RASTER_FORMAT .

The content of the rasterFormat structure influences the RIP user interface. For example, the RIP disables the screening controls in the user interface if screensRequired is set to screensRequired_none .