KB358423613: Imaging Engine - Allowing halftone angle and rulings from native PDF files since 22.03

Summary

By default Imaging Engines before 22.03 only took information from halftone dictionaries with Esko metadata (either Normalised or PDF+).
As ArtPro+ can also generate Native PDF files with no Esko dot shape specified in the halftone dictionaries, and therefore no Esko metadata, it was decided to allow this by default with version 22.03 and newer.

PDFs may also be generated by 3rd party applications with halftone dictionaries specifying the required angle and rulings, but no Esko-specific parameters.

There have been already options in PMPreferences.xml that could control which type of halftone dictionaries PixelMachine had taken information from.

@PreProcessHalftones:

• "Never" to skip halftones processing
• "Always" to pre-process halftone dictionaries (for object based screening)
• "PDF+" to preprocess only halftone dictionaries with PDF+ extensions
• "NormalisedAndPDF+" to preprocess only halftone dictionaries with PDF+ and NormalisedPDF extension

Old default value was "NormalisedAndPDF+" and new default values since 22.03 is "Always".

With this change the angle and ruling available in native PDF files will be used in the rip-tasks depending on the setting of the "Use From File" option.

Possible Effects

There could be some effects by this change for those who rerun a separation for a job where:

• Angles/ruling are taken from file but the dot is from the ticket
• The files are from another vendor or a Native PDF files with no Esko halftone metadata
• They did not notice that the angles/rulings did not come from file but from the ticket instead