Cambridge UK -- Substantial enhancements to trapping and transparency performance as well as spot color processing have been introduced in the latest upgrade to the Harlequin RIP – the Harlequin PLUS Server RIP (v.8.1) - to bring increased productivity and efficiency to pre-press departments, digital print and workflow operations.

Improvements to TrapPro ,the Harlequin in-RIP trapping engine, increase trapping performance up to eight times due to more efficient use of memory. The performance of complex live transparent jobs is also improved. Transparency, and the use of complex transparencies in particular, are featuring increasingly in graphic design work. While Harlequin RIP users have never needed to flatten transparent artwork because all Harlequin RIPs since Version 6.0 have automatically recognised when PDF files contain live transparency and generated the correct result, this new enhancement represents an important advance in terms of productivity gains.

Spot color conversion in Harlequin ColorPro has also been fine-tuned to give increased accuracy. Harlequin ColorPro provides color process control to give accurate, consistent and predictable color reproduction and supports RGB, CMYK, N-color and Gray ICC 4.0 profiles.

The Harlequin RIP already sets the standard for performance in the commercial printing industry. Last years' release of Version 8.0 at drupa introduced multi-threaded rendering taking full advantage of Duo and Quad core technologies as well as a special feature to speed up the processing of variable data in PDF files even if they were not created using specific variable data tools.
   
Upgrades can be purchased through Global Graphics' OEMs including Agfa, ECRM, Xitron, RTI, Polkadots, Screen, Fusion Systems, Compose and Presstek.