#RASTER IMAGE PROCESSOR SOFTWARE#

Screening: In order to print, the continuous-tone image is converted into a halftone (pattern of dots).

Simple languages were designed to work on minimal hardware, so tend to 'directly drive' the renderer. In practical RIPs, interpretation and rendering are frequently done together.

Rendering: A process through which the private internal representation is turned into a continuous-tone bitmap.

After a page has been output, the page state is discarded to prepare for the next page. Most RIPs process pages serially, one page at a time, so the current machine state is only for the current page.

Interpretation: This is the stage where the supported PDLs (page description languages) are translated into a private internal representation of each page.

So, for example, Linotype RIPs supported CORA (RIP30).

The RIP chip in a laser printer sends its raster image output to the laser.Įarlier RIPs retained backward compatibility with phototypesetters/photosetters, so they supported the older languages. Every PostScript printer contains a RIP in its firmware.

#RASTER IMAGE PROCESSOR SOFTWARE#

Ghostscript, GhostPCL, and ColorBurst's Overdrive (for macOS) are examples of software RIPs. For high-end typesetting, standalone hardware RIPs are sometimes used. RS-232) and generated a 'hardware bitmap output' which was used to enable or disable each pixel on a real-time output device such as an optical film recorder, computer to film, or computer to plate.Ī RIP can be implemented as a software module on a general-purpose computer, or as a firmware program executed on a microprocessor inside a printer. Originally a RIP was a rack of electronic hardware which received the page description via some interface (e.g. The input can also be or include bitmaps of higher or lower resolution than the output device, which the RIP resizes using an image scaling algorithm. The input may be a page description in a high-level page description language such as PostScript, PDF, or XPS. Such a bitmap is used by a later stage of the printing system to produce the printed output. A raster image processor ( RIP) is a component used in a printing system which produces a raster image also known as a bitmap.

Raster image processor