Integrating Harlequin Core into your solution (Linux, macOS, and Windows)

To view v13.x documentation, go to the top level of the legacy documentation.

This page applies to Harlequin Core SDK v14.0r0 and later

Once you’ve installed and activated your copy of Harlequin Core and used it to RIP a number of PDF files with a variety of configurations, you can discover more about how to make it work within the solution that you’re building.

The Harlequin Core is a toolkit with versatile capabilities and the SDK provides many features that are useful in delivering solutions based on it. To get an overview of the possibilities, please see Harlequin Core RIP Capabilities & Features.

The Harlequin Core has very rich and flexible controls for a wide variety of use cases. That richness, however, can make it difficult to find the right information to allow you to make it do what you need it to do. Please see Guide to Harlequin Core Resources which directs you to the right resources. It also lists the example configurations, Page Features, and sample files.

To learn more about how to configure the RIP for different resolutions, raster interleaving, color spaces and how to set up color management, see the Harlequin Extensions Manual.

The Harlequin Core RIP is supplied as a pre-built binary library with two layers around it that are supplied as source code.

The inner layer, or “skinkit”, is supplied in source just because there’s a very small likelihood that you may need to change it.
On the other hand, the outer layer, or “skintest”, is there as boilerplate code for you to amend as necessary to integrate the Core efficiently into your solution. For example, you can change skintest to add a “raster back end” to deliver raster data in exactly the format you require.
You can also build your own code modules that interface directly with the Harlequin Core RIP (for example, to recover progress and error information, to receive optimized rasters for variable data print, or to replace or augment the built-in color management).

The technical documentation for all that code and the APIs is delivered in the SDK itself: doc/hqnripsdk-html/index.html and also online at https://api.globalgraphics.com/harlequin/.