Book your demo of SmartDFE at PRINTING United Expo 2023

If you’re looking for a digital front end to drive your high-speed, single-pass inkjet press, we invite you to join us at PRINTING United Expo 2023, where we will be showcasing SmartDFE™.

Winner of a prestigious 2023 PRINTING United Pinnacle Product Award in the Technology category, SmartDFE is a full software stack for high-speed, single-pass presses printing fully variable data.

Built upon Harlequin Direct™, the world’s fastest PDF RIP, and using patented components that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, it provides rasterization and inkjet drop generation for the best possible image quality and fastest printing speeds. Its automation capabilities provide complete control of the print workflow as well as valuable information for QA and inspection, press maintenance and stock control.

It will be the second time at PRINTING United that we will be exhibiting alongside our sister companies in Hybrid Software Group: ColorLogic GmbH, HYBRID Software, iC3D, Meteor Inkjet and Xitron.

“Hybrid Software Group is a unique resource for PRINTING United Expo 2023 attendees. Our software products have contributed to the success of many print providers, ranging from commercial printers to packaging converters as well as wide format/specialty printers. However, our six business units also provide vital OEM technologies to many vendors who use our products and know-how to create digital front ends for fast and powerful digital presses,” comments Mike Rottenborn, Hybrid Software Group PLC CEO.

Contact Peter Kushnieruk, David Stevenson or Justin Bailey today to arrange your personal demonstration of SmartDFE. We look forward to welcoming you to Stand B8079!

PICK UP YOUR FREE ENTRY PASS USING CODE 220061

 

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Working with spot colors in Harlequin Core

Whenever we start working with a company who’s interested in using Harlequin Core™ for their Digital Front End (DFE), there are always three technical topics under discussion: speed, quality and capabilities. Speed and quality are often very quick discussions; much of the time they’ve approached us because they’re already convinced that Harlequin can do what they need. In the remaining cases we tend to jointly agree that the best way for them to be convinced is for them to take a copy of Harlequin Core and to run their own tests. There’s nothing quite like trying something on your own systems to give yourself confidence in the results.

So that leaves capabilities.

If the company already sells a DFE using a different core RIP they will almost always want to at least match, and usually to extend, the functionality of their existing solution when they switch to Harlequin. And if they’re building their first DFE they usually have a clear idea of what their target market will need.

At that stage we start by ensuring that we all understand that Harlequin Core can deliver rasters in whatever format is required (color channels, interleaving, resolution, bit depth, halftoning) and then cover color management pretty quickly (yes, Harlequin uses ICC profiles, including v4 and DeviceLink; yes, you can chain multiple profiles in arbitrary sequences, etc).

Then we usually come on to a series of questions that boil down to handling spot colors:

  • Most spot separations in jobs will be emulated on my digital press; can I adjust that emulation?
  • Can I make sure that the emulation works well with ICC profiles for different substrates?
  • Can I include special device colorants, such as White and Silver inks in that emulation?
  • Can I alias one spot separation name to another?
  • Can I make technical separations, like cut and fold lines, completely disappear, without knocking out if somebody upstream didn’t set them to overprint?
  • Alternatively, can I extract technical separations as vector graphics to drive a cutter/plotter with?

Since the answer to all of those is ‘yes’ we can then move on to areas where the vendor is looking for a unique capability …

But I’ve always been slightly disappointed that we don’t get to talk more about some of the interesting corners of spot handling in Harlequin. So I created a video to walk through some examples. Take a look, and I’d welcome your comments and questions!

Further reading:

  1. Channelling how many spot colors?!!
  2. Shade and color variation in textile printing
  3. Harlequin Core – the heart of your digital press
  4. What is a raster image processor 

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Digital press data rates – and why they matter

Following his post last week about the speed and scalability of your raster image processor, in this film, Martin Bailey, distinguished technologist at Global Graphics Software, explains how to determine how much raster image processor (RIP) power you need to drive a digital press by calculating the press data rate. It’s the best way of calculating how much RIP power you need in the Digital Front End (DFE) to drive it at engine speed and to ensure profitable printing.

Further reading:

  1. Harlequin Core – the heart of your digital press
  2. What is a raster image processor 
  3. Ditch the disk: a new generation of RIPs to drive your digital press
  4. Is your printer software up to the job?
  5. Where is screening performed in the workflow
  6. What is halftone screening?
  7. Unlocking document potential

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Speed and Scalability: two things to consider when choosing a RIP for your digital inkjet press

If you’re building a digital press, or a digital front end (DFE) to drive a digital press, you want it to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. As the trend towards printing short runs and personalization grows, especially in combination with increasing resolutions, more colorants and faster presses, the speed and scalability of the raster image processor (RIP) inside that DFE are key factors in determining profitability.

For your digital press to print at speed you’ll need to understand the amount of data that it requires, i.e. its data rate. In this film, Martin Bailey, distinguished technologist at Global Graphics Software, explains how different stages in data handling will need different data rates and how to integrate the appropriate number of RIP cores to generate that much data without inflating the bill of materials and DFE hardware.

Martin also explains that your next press may have a much higher data rate requirement than your current one.

For more information about the Harlequin Core visit: www.globalgraphics.com/harlequin

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HP PageWide Industrial raises the bar with the Harlequin RIP

The HP T1190 digital inkjet press
The HP T1190 digital inkjet press

In this latest case study, Tom Bouman, worldwide workflow product marketing manager at HP PageWide Industrial, explains why the Harlequin RIP®, with its track record for high quality and speed and its ability to scale, was the obvious choice to use at the heart of its digital front end when the division was set up to develop presses for the industrial inkjet market back in 2008.

Today, the Harlequin RIP Core is at the heart of all the PageWide T-series presses, driving the HP Production Elite Print Server digital front end. Presses range from 20-inch for commercial printing, through to the large 110-inch (T1100 series) printers for high-volume corrugated pre-print, offering a truly scalable solution that sets the standard in performance and quality.

Read the full story here.

Further reading:

  1. Harlequin Core – the heart of your digital press
  2. What is a raster image processor 
  3. Where is screening performed in the workflow
  4. What is halftone screening?
  5. Unlocking document potential


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Harlequin Core – the heart of your digital press

Product manager Paul Dormer gives an insight into why the Harlequin Core is the leading print OEMs’ first choice to power digital inkjet presses in this new film.

A raster image processor (RIP), Harlequin Core converts text, object and image data from file formats such as PDF, TIFF™ or JPEG, into a raster that a printing device can understand. It’s at the heart of the digital front end that drives the press.

Proven in the field for decades, Harlequin Core is known for its incredible speed and is the fastest RIP engine available. It is used in every print sector, from industrial inkjet such as textiles and flooring, to labels and packaging, commercial, transactional, and newspapers.

As presses become wider, faster, and higher resolution, handling vast amounts of data, the Harlequin Core remains the RIP of choice for many leading brands including HP, Mimaki, Mutoh, Roland, Durst, Agfa and Delphax.

Further reading:

  1. What is a raster image processor 
  2. Where is screening performed in the workflow
  3. What is halftone screening?
  4. Unlocking document potential


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Farewell “Harlequin Host Renderer”, hello “Harlequin Core”

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”.

Global Graphics Software product entry point diagram

Further reading:

1. What is a Raster Image Processor (RIP)

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AI – Man vs Machine – a new way of thinking?

When drupa opened its virtual doors this year, Eric Worrall, Global Graphics Software’s VP of products and services, joined industry colleagues from the SAS-Institute, Zaikio GmbH and Print Business Media and took part in one of the live sessions: a discussion about how man adapts to the world where machines can make decisions faster and with more precision than man can, and what print companies need to understand and do to prepare for the upheaval.

Do we need a new way to think about what printers do?

Watch it here:

To find out more about the smart factory and the smart digital front end, visit our website.

Further reading:

Connecting print to the smart factory

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Ditch the disk: a new generation of RIPs to drive your digital press

Vast amounts of data can slow down your digital press resulting in wasted product or delayed delivery times.
Vast amounts of data can slow down your digital press resulting in wasted product or delayed delivery times.

In this post, Global Graphics Software’s product manager for Mako, David Stevenson, explores the challenge of printing large amounts of raster data and the options available to ensure that data doesn’t slow down your digital press:

The print market is increasingly moving to digital: digital printing offers many advantages over conventional printing, the most valuable of these is mass-produced, personalized output making every copy of the print different. At the same time  digital presses are getting faster, wider, and printing at higher resolutions with extended gamut color becoming common place.

To drive the new class of digital presses, you need vast amounts of raster data every second. Traditional print software designed for non-digital workflows attempts to handle this vast amount of data by RIPping ahead, storing rasters to physical disks. However, the rate at which data is needed for the digital press causes disk-based workflows to rapidly hit the data rate boundary. This is the point where even state-of-the-art storage devices are simply too small and slow for the huge data rates required to keep the press running at full rated speed.

This is leading to a new generation of RIPs that ditch the disk and RIP print jobs on the fly directly to the press electronics. As well as driving much higher data rates, it also has the benefit of no wasted time RIPping ahead.

As you can imagine, RIPping directly to the press electronics presents some engineering challenges. For example, two print jobs may look identical before and after printing, but the way in which they have been made can cause them to RIP at very different rates. Additionally, your RIP of choice can have optimizations that make jobs constructed in certain ways to RIP faster or slower. This variability in print job and RIP time is a bit like playing a game of Russian roulette: if you lose the press will be starved of data causing wasted product or delivery delays.

With a RIP driving your press directly you need to have confidence that all jobs submitted can be printed at full speed. That means you need the performance of each print job and page to be predictable and you need to know what speed the press can be run at for a given combination of print Job, RIP and PC.

Knowing this, you may choose to slow down the press so that your RIP can keep up. Better still, keep the press running at full speed by streamlining the job with knowledge of optimizations that work well with your choice of RIP.

Or you could choose to return the print job to the generator with a report explaining what is causing it to run slowly. Armed with this information, the generator can rebuild the job, optimized for your chosen RIP.

Whatever you choose, you will need predictable print jobs to drive your press at the highest speed to maximize your digital press’s productivity.

If you want to know more about the kind of job objects and structure that can slow RIPs down, and the challenge of producing predictable jobs, download this guide: Full Speed Ahead – how to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press.

You can also find out more about software to optimize both PDFs and non-PDFs for your digital press by visiting our website.

Further reading:

Is your printer software up to the job? The impact of rising data rates on software evolved from traditional print processes 

Future-proofing your digital press to cope with rising data rates

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Connecting print to the Smart Factory

This week WhatTheyThink launched its 2021 Technology Outlook – a resource guide designed for you to quickly learn about new innovations from industry analysts and thought leaders. It includes five technology focus areas: digital printing, labels & packaging, software & workflow, wide format & signage and textiles & apparel, and finishing.

As part of the software & workflow technology focus, David Zwang of WhatTheyThink chatted to our VP of products and services, Eric Worrall, about digital front ends (DFEs), the elements that comprise a DFE, and the recent launch of Global Graphics’ SmartDFE™, a complete single-source software and electronics stack that does everything from job creation through to printhead electronics, and a vital component in the smart factory of the future. Smart factories are designed to autonomously run the entire production process and this will include the print subsystems.

Watch it here:

Global Graphics Software's Eric Worrall talking about Smart DFEs
Global Graphics Software’s Eric Worrall talking about Smart DFEs

To find out more about the smart factory and the smart digital front end, visit our website.

 

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