How to generate halftone tints from only one Primary color

[thanhhahuy]

Hi all,
I am working on a CMYK laser printer. I need to obtain a rectangle
filled with halftone tints of only one primary color (magenta for
example).

For monochrome printers, using PCL, I simply fill a rectangle using
SetBrushSource with a certain gray_value such as 128;

Now for color laser printers, how to do the similar task but the color
now is Magenta instead of Black in the above case?

Is it possible to generate halftone tints with only one primary color?
or I have to mix some colors to generate the halftone?

Thanks

 

[Elmo P. Shagnasty]

Now for color laser printers, how to do the similar task but the color
now is Magenta instead of Black in the above case?

Is it possible to generate halftone tints with only one primary color?
or I have to mix some colors to generate the halftone?

You call out the color. You could start with using a program that uses
CMYK and create boxes of the colors you want, then inspect the print
stream to see how it calls them out for that printer.

Yes, it's possible to generate halftone tints with only one primary
color. You don't mix ANY colors to generate what you're looking for.
Worst case, you'd call out cyan as (1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0)--at least, that's
what it would look like in Postscript.

But there's more to it than that. MUCH more to it, depending on the
CMYK printer in question. What make/model of printer is it? Does it
have its own built-in RIP? If so, who makes the RIP? Or is the RIP an
external piece? Again, who makes it?

In general, if you call out a solid CMYK build it will not come out of
the RIP the same way it went in. I won't go into details, but what you
really need is some way of telling the RIP for the print engine to pass
your color call straight through without doing any CMYK simulation
processing.

There is no single answer to your question, because it depends on the
RIP for the print engine and how it processes color.

 

[thanhhahuy]

The problem is that if the color is (1,0,0,0) , the box will be filled
with just pure cyan, that means there will be no halftone tints on the
box/ It is similar as we fill in a box with black color for a
monochrome printer.

In this case, do I need to fill in the color: (.5,0,0,0) to obtain the
Cyan halftone tints?

Thanks