(v13) Dynamic control of separation production
This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.
The ability to control which separations are produced, on a page by page basis, is useful in several common cases. A major reason for having this ability is to avoid using media or processing time for separations that are blank or have no useful content.
Blank or non-useful separations can occur when:
- A multi-page job uses spot colors on some pages only. Always producing the spot color separation would mean producing irrelevant separations for pages not using that color.
- An application draws page ornamentation such as register marks on all separations, even when some separations have no “real” page content.
- A monochrome or preseparated job is accidentally submitted using a page setup that is intended for automatic separation of composite color jobs.
To handle these cases, you can set the keys in the SeparationDetails dictionary to tell the RIP to do any of these things:
- Add separations for spot colors as they are encountered within a job, and remove them afterwards.
- Suppress separations that have no useful content.
- Consider some types of marks as always ornamentation or unintentional, for example: marks drawn in the
BeginPageorEndPageprocedures or in particular colors. - Abort the job when separating if the job is inappropriate, to allow for operator intervention.
In all cases, GUI versions of the RIP produce a message in the Monitor Window and log file to say where and why separations are being omitted.