Capabilities of the Harlequin RIP

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

This manual lists the main capabilities of the Harlequin RIP. It is intended an overview of what you can achieve with a little bit of interfacing and configuration. The technical details of those tasks can be found in Harlequin RIP SDK documentation and Harlequin Extensions Manual. The overview pages usually provide direct links to the appropriate sections.

The following capabilities are presented (some introduced in this manual, some linked to an introduction in the Harlequin Extensions Manual):

• Color management

• Screening
• Fonts

• Extensive options for Color separation

• Optimizing variable data with Harlequin VariData

• Calibration

• Imposition

• Trapping: TrapPro

• Tiling large pages

To utilize your hardware's parallel processing capability, there are two sets of tools:

• Running multiple threads within a RIP: Multi-threading and Harlequin Parallel Pages (HPP)

• Running multiple RIPs on a single job: The Harlequin Scalable RIP

Technical features in the SDK are worth knowing about (some introduced in this manual, some linked to an introduction in the API documentation):

• Hot folder support

• Input queue

• Raster backend output API, for writing your own backends

• Support for Harlequin VariData in raster backends

• RIP Data Resource System, a global database of APIs and other named resources

• Events, for communication between subsystems, such as between the RIP Core and skins

• Timelines, for observing many processing steps in the RIP and getting meaningful indications of progress