Custom screening

When you select a supplier for the RIPs that you will build into your solutions they will probably offer a number of screens with it, just as Global Graphics offers the Harlequin Screening Library. Those screens will deliver for a number of situations, but you may wish to add your own screens, perhaps for a market sector not addressed by those supplied, to fine-tune for your specific device, or for some other reason.

Such screens will typically fall into one of two types:
  • Pre-generated caches are formed of one or more look-up tables, similar to those described in the PostScript Reference Manual for Type 3, 6, 10 or 14 screens. Each table defines the order in which pixels are illuminated when creating the halftone dots for various levels of colorant.
  • Programmatic screens are computer code that examines each pixel in the raster output as contone, together with the surrounding pixels, and determines which should be marked and which should be unmarked in the screened output.

Your chosen RIP should allow you to integrate both kinds of screen and should deliver high-quality rendering of those screens at high speed. You will also need to be able to protect your intellectual property in those screens, and may wish to be able to charge for them separately from the RIP sale.

And if you want to drive your device with multi-bit screening, you will need the flexibility to deliver both kinds of screening with full multi-bit support, enabling you to maximize the image quality that your output device can achieve.