We’ve now been shipping the Harlequin Host Renderer™ (HHR) to OEMs and partners for over a decade, driving digital printers and presses. Back then Harlequin was our only substantial software component for use in digital front ends (DFEs), and we just came up with a name that seemed to describe what it did.
Since then our technology set includes a component that can be used upstream of the RIP, for creating, modifying, analyzing, visualizing, etc page description languages like PDF: that’s Mako™. And we’ve also added a high-performance halftone screening engine: ScreenPro™.
We’ve positioned these components as a “Core” range and their names reflect this: “Mako Core” and “ScreenPro Core”. We also added higher level components in our Direct™ range, for printer OEMs who don’t want to dig into the complexities of system engineering, or who want to get to market faster.
Harlequin is already part of Harlequin Direct™, and we’re now amending the name of the SDK to bring it into line with our other “Core” component technologies. The diagram below shows how those various offerings fit together for a wide range of digital printer and press vendors (please click on it for a better view).
So, farewell “Harlequin Host Renderer”, hello “Harlequin Core”.
Further reading:
1. What is a Raster Image Processor (RIP)
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