Jaws
gDocThe Harlequin RIP’s patent-pending font emulation feature and winner of a 2007 PIA/GATF Intertech™ Technology Award provides in-RIP font emulation for time-critical applications such as print-on-demand, newspapers, magazines, and any jobs where artwork or advertising is supplied independently of the customer. A typographically acceptable match for missing fonts is created with no text overflow and with appropriate character spacing, weight, and width. Problem files are simply sent to the RIP as usual, and the RIP constructs a suitable replacement on the fly.
Emulated fonts have the correct width for every glyph in the font, so that letter and word spacing will be correct, and justified text will continue to be justified, with a straight edge to the text block.
Extended and condensed fonts are emulated just as well as regular typefaces and are constructed at the correct weight, from extra thin to extra black, so the overall appearance of the page (what typographers call the ‘color’) will be unchanged.
The emulated fonts will also be slanted at the right angle, allowing oblique and italic fonts to be correctly displayed. In addition, italic faces will be slightly more ornate than emulations of the roman faces from the same family.
And the emulation won’t cause any re-flow; there won’t be any changes to line-ends and page breaks.
- The ability to recognize the missing font by name
- A database of style, spacing, height and width for each font name
- The database currently contains over 1600 specified fonts
- Font Emulation only supports the standard Latin characters
PDF, PostScript and EPS files
If the job is submitted as a PDF file, then information required to construct the emulation font will be derived from the PDF file itself. If it’s submitted as a PostScript or EPS file instead, then the relevant information must be drawn from the database of font metrics supplied with the RIP.
Turning font emulation on and off
If you’re catering for demanding buyers you can disable font emulation as necessary. A Harlequin RIP can support a number of input channels, which may be AppleTalk printers, hot folders, or any other route for submitting jobs to it. Each channel is associated with a “Page Setup”, which is a form of job ticket that’s attached to every job supplied through that channel. Each page setup can be individually set to allow font emulation or not, so, even if you don’t want to use font emulation for making plates, you can turn it on for proofs produced for evaluating color, for instance … or for that occasional job where you just need another way around the problem.
Each page setup also includes a switch to say what should happen if you’ve enabled font emulation and a required font could not be emulated; the RIP can either fall back on a default font, or can cancel the job so that you don’t waste expensive media.
- Produces acceptable, readable copy using another font
- Ideal for rapid turnaround workflows typical of digital printing
- It’s automatic: the Harlequin RIP constructs the replacement font on the fly
- Emulated fonts have the correct width for every glyph in the font, so that letter and word spacing will be correct
- Justified text will continue to be justified, with a straight edge to the text block.
- Extended and condensed fonts are emulated just as well as regular typefaces
- The emulated fonts will also be slanted at the right angle, allowing oblique and italic fonts to be correctly displayed.
- The emulation won’t cause any re-flow; there won’t be any changes to line-ends and page breaks.
- the emulation is close enough that it will usually be acceptable by all but the most demanding of print buyers, at least for body fonts.
- Font emulation can be disabled as necessary
