Color separation
This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.
The Harlequin RIP interpreter is capable of processing color jobs and producing separations from them automatically. This mechanism provides:
- Simple separation into process colors on consecutive media
- Separations of spot colors specified using a
Separationcolor space - Separations of spot colors specified using Adobe’s conventions for the Level 1 PostScript language, including some application-specific variations
- Separation of jobs using device-independent color spaces or compressed color images (it is not possible to separate such jobs in advance because there is “cross talk” between the different color components)
- Layout of separations on one or more sheets
- Ability to add crop marks, color bars, annotation, registration marks, and other arbitrary marginalia, independent of the original job, with some elements different and others in common over all the separations (these are called background separations)
- Ability to print the same separation several times, giving step-and-repeat in color (for example, a sheet of cyan repeats followed by a sheet of aligned magenta repeats and so on) or monochrome (just a sheet of black repeats), all from a single original
- A single set of printer’s marks in the margin for a sheet containing several repeats
- Selective omission of separations (while ensuring that knockouts arising as a result of one separation appear on the others, although the color itself is not output)
- Control of overprinting (knockouts), especially of black
- Separation into either halftoned single-bit or continuous-tone 8-bit rasters (and other variations), and processing of knockouts and overprinting in 32-bit continuous-tone CMYK (see Continuous tone and color printers)