Re: Halftones in PDF files

["Thomas Michanek" <thomas.michanek@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Does anyone know a straightforward way to specify a halftone screen when
> printing from FrameMaker that allows it to be preserved in the PDF?
> 
> FM 5.5.6, Acrobat 5.0.5, Illustrator 9.0.2, AdobePS 4.5.2, Win 98 SE.

If I have understood you correctly, you want to specify the line screen
frequency (and possibly angle) of the halftone rasters generated in
PostScript code for graphics or text in color or grayscale. Is that correct?

FM doesn't have an option to specify this, so it uses the screen settings
specified in the printer or printer driver. If you have a PostScript
printer driver that has a PostScript setting for halftone screens, you
could possibly use that driver when creating the PS file. But we all
know you should use the Acrobat Distiller driver for PDF files, and
AFAIK that driver doesn't let you specify the screen settings.

One option could be to postprocess the PostScript file before Distilling,
and insert a "setscreen" command at an appropriate place in the code.
The problem is finding a place that will work for all PS files...

I have a script for inserting such a command in the PostScript code
generated by FM 4.x and 5.x on UNIX, that will correctly set the halftone
screen for the whole document (at least for printing; I haven't tried
Distilling). I don't know if this would work for the PostScript created
by FM on Windows, but it basically does the following:
Immediately after the "%%EndSetup" line, insert the line
"<frequency> <angle> currentscreen exch pop exch pop setscreen"
(insert your desired frequency and angle values, in lpi and degrees)

Hope this helps,

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Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
Technical Writer, IAR Systems, Uppsala, Sweden
mailto:Thomas.Michanek@telia.com
http://go.to/framers/
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