pagedevice keys

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.

The following section describes pagedevice keys.

For details of additional keys such as ProcessColorModel and ColorantFamilies, see Color spaces and color management.

ValuesPerComponent in the page device

integer Default: 2

The number of distinct values for a color (or gray) component in the rasters to be produced from this page device. The legal values are 2, 4, 16, 256, 1024, 4096, 65281, and 65536. That is, 2 raised to the power of 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, and 16, and the additional value of 65281, which corresponds to the internal range.

The values 1024 and 4096 are only used for RLE output (only available with the Harlequin Core).

Values of 4 and 16 are for 2-bit and 4-bit multi-level screened output, and are therefore supported in Harlequin Core, but not in Harlequin MultiRIP.

Internally, the Harlequin RIP processes color values in the range 0–0xFF00=65280. This is scaled up while rendering when ValuesPerComponent is 65536.

InterleavingStyle in the page device

integer Default: 1

This is the interleaving style as in the plugin’s raster format, and derived from it directly. For a diagram of the data arrangement for the styles, see Figure: Color raster interleaving methods. The values are:

OverrideSeparations in the page device

boolean 

Default: false

If true, the setting of the Separations key are ignored. This allows the RIP to process as composite, a job which explicitly tries to turn on separations or tries to change the separations originally configured. This prevents the job from changing the colorants in any way, that is, no changes can be made to ProcessColorModel, SeparationColorNames and SeparationOrder.

When OverrideSeparations is false, the job can turn on separations and select the colorants to which it wants to separate, as per [RB3].

OverrideSeparations does not prevent calls to the addtoseparationcolornames and addtoseparationorder operators from having an effect.

SeparationDetails in the page device

dictionary

This dictionary controls which separations are produced. There are keys to control automatically adding spot separations and omitting blank separations. Full details in  the section SeparationDetails.

BackdropAutoSeparations in the page device

boolean

This key controls whether spot colors are composited independently during transparency operations. If true, they are converted to device colors at the end of the compositing and before output. If false, spot colors are converted to process colors during interpretation and only process colors are composited. The default is true, which provides a better quality output, but a value of false gives better performance.

PackingUnitRequest in the page device

integer

This key is used to request a different packing unit for the output. The packing unit selected is reflected in the PackingUnitBits %pagedevice% parameter. For more information see PackingUnitBits (%pagebuffer% device). Changing the PackingUnitRequest allows the plugin or back-end to handle the raster in native machine words.

PackingUnitRequest is ignored when halftone or RLE output are selected.

RLE is only available with the Harlequin Core.

The default value of PackingUnitRequest is 0. This value matches any packing unit size. For compatibility, contone formats selects PackingUnitBits 8, except for band-interleaved, frame-interleaved, or monochrome output with ValuesPerComponent 65281 or 65536, which selects PackingUnitBits 16. A PackingUnitRequest of 16 must be explicitly requested to select wider contone raster packing for other formats. A PackingUnitRequest of 8 may be explicitly requested for ValuesPerComponent 65281 or 65536.

The PackingUnitRequest sizes supported for contone output are 8 and 16. If the requested PackingUnitRequest is not supported, the RIP throws a configuration error.