(v13) 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. Continuous tone formats are characterized by: the color(s) of the output, the number of bits occupied by each pixel, the order of the colors, and the method of interleaving the data.
• Run-length encoded, for specialized applications where the Harlequin RIP is interfacing to some other system.

The color formats are controlled by page device keys /Separations, and /RunLength .In core-RIP systems, the raster is delivered raw to the OEM’s surrounding code; in GUI versions, it is wrapped up in the protocol understood by plugins, from which it can then be converted to whatever form is suitable; in command-line versions the output formats are currently built in.