Color and raster depth: formats supported
This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.
Colorant sets
Naturally, colorants for the standard device spaces are available, such as DeviceGray (grayscale), DeviceCMYK and DeviceRGB.
Arbitrary spot colors can be added, up to 8188 colorants.
Any extended gamut format can be supported if the appropriate color management is supplied.
Raster page images
The Harlequin RIP supports common raster formats, such as:
- Single-bit halftoned rasters of entire separations (including those produced by automatically separating a color job)
- 8-bit grayscale rasters of entire separations
- 24-bit Red – Green – Blue rasters, pixel interleaved (with the color components in any order)
- 32-bit Cyan – Magenta – Yellow – Black, pixel interleaved (with the color components in any order)
- 8-bit CMYKOG band interleaved rasters
Generally, halftone rasters can be 1 bit, 2 bit, 4 bit or 8 bit deep (but often using only a subset of the 4/16/256 values).
Contone rasters can be 8 bit or 16 bit deep.
Most combinations of colorant sets and raster depths are possible, although all output channels need to have the same depth. Color components can be in any order and even imposed on the same channel.
Run-length encoded page images
The run-length encoded (RLE) format is available as:
- 8-bit monochrome
- 10-bit monochrome
- 10-bit composite color
- 12-bit composite color
RLE is technically contone, but screening information is embedded in it, so the backend could screen it as directed by the job and the RIP configuration. The data format is documented in [SWRLE].
Configuration
Colorant sets and raster formats are configured using page device keys, see Color format control keys.