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