The Harlequin Scalable RIP

This page applies to Harlequin v14.0r0 and later; and to Harlequin Core but not Harlequin MultiRIP.

When Harlequin Core is run in Scalable RIP mode, it initially acts as the controlling RIP; this spawns a number of clones, referred to as farm RIPs. The farm RIPs spawn transparently, with customer code not needing to know whether Harlequin Core is running in Scalable RIP mode or not. The only difference is much-increased performance because jobs are efficiently processed using all the farm RIPs.

The Scalable RIP:

• Allows a job to be submitted to the Scalable RIP with appropriate configuration data.

• Processes a multiple-page PDF across multiple RIPs (by ripping page ranges in parallel); it can RIP multiple single-page PDFs in parallel.

A single-page PDF of any size is unlikely to benefit from the use of the Scalable RIP.

• Gets as much performance out of the underlying hardware as possible..

The splitting of jobs is only available for PDF jobs. Although submitting other PDL jobs (such as PostScript) to the Scalable RIP is supported, these jobs do not benefit from the parallel processing by multiple RIPs. You can also use your own raster backend to Harlequin Core inside the context of a Scalable RIP, just as you can with Harlequin Core now.