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Advanced Settings
The Use Advanced Settings check box is available only if you have chosen
a PostScript output device. Most of the so-called advanced controls can
be adjusted on the Separations page, with a few reserved for the Advanced
Separation Settings dialog hiding behind the Advanced button. Most users
wont need to touch these complex options, and well get to
that momentarily.
When you initially enter the Advanced Separations Settings dialog, the
Screening Technology field is set to Standard Defaults. These are the
normal halftone screen angles and frequencies for your output device.
The angle settings have long been conventional in the preparation of color
separations: 0, 15, 45, and 75 degrees. They will be common to any output
device you choose. The frequency defaults will vary depending on the output
device and selected resolution.
This dialog provides several ways of changing the default settings, though
that will seldom be necessary. One way is to select a color and then type
specific values in the Frequency and Angle boxes. Or choose from the drop-down
list of industry-standard screening technologies; these assign the values
for all four CMYK plates at once. Any Pantone color plates present will
initially take on the same screen settings as process black (unless you
have specified a custom screen angle from the PostScript options in the
Color dialog). For most spot-color work, this is perfectly acceptablethough
not if you have areas where tints of several Pantone colors are going
to mix. In that case, you can and should alter the angles.
Overprint Color In DRAW 7, each CMYK color setting could be modified
in the Current Selection area. DRAW 8 changed that and continuing in DRAW
9, you make your modifications in the list itself. To overprint color,
click on the icon to the far-right of the color you want to overprint
(the icon changes are very subtle). This is the same for the large A,
which indicates Overprint Text. These settings give you the option of
overprinting objects (graphics, text, or both) that are filled with the
color you select. This can be especially useful when working with Pantone
colors. Its much faster than having to overprint object by object.
Have the Advanced Settings Lost Their Audience?
If you prepare print files for high-resolution output at a service
bureau, talk to your service bureau before you venture into the
Advanced Separations Settings dialog. One of the larger service
bureaus in our area told us that typically, throughout the industry,
virtually any angle and frequency choices you make in this dialog
for CMYK plates will be ignored when the file is output. Although
such screening technologies are used, the settings are made on the
imagesetting system itself. When you submit your file and indicate
the resolution and nominal screen frequency you want, the service
bureau operators will set these values directly on their hardware,
overriding the global settings in your file. One of Corels
engineers confirmed this and recommended the DRAW defaults. Before
you invest a lot of time experimenting with these settings, realize
that in most instances they wont be used.
One scenario in which fiddling with the defaults might be useful
is when you are outputting directly from DRAW to your own imagesetter
or another device. Instead of constantly resetting your hardware,
leave any custom screening turned off and simply set the desired
frequency and angle values for each document as it is printed.
We asked our informative Corel engineer whether one might be able
to use custom screening settings in a .prn file destined
for a Brand X imagesetter that doesnt incorporate similar
technology. The answer was no. Without the technology, the device
cant produce the proper halftone dots required by the custom
screen and frequency settings. So there would be no advantage over
the standard screen settings.
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Weve already mentioned that you can control the halftone settings
individually for each color plate, including any Pantone plates that will
be made. But what happens if you have some areas filled with only a 15%
tint of the dark Pantone color? You certainly wouldnt want that
to overprint. DRAW recognizes that, and has an inherent minimum tint of
95%, below which objects will not overprint.
Halftone Type The option to choose the halftone type is seldom
used but can help you create some interesting special effects. Your choice
determines the shape of the halftone object (usually a circular dot, but
there are other choices available). You might, for example, choose to
print a fairly coarse screen frequency for each color, while using a line
or diamond halftone type to create an interesting texture.
No discussion of printing and separations is complete without an exploration
of color theory and practice, and that makes Chapter 27, Color for
the Color Blind, required reading for those who want a good grasp
on driving DRAW in color.
Halftones for Skin Tones
An engineer at Corel told us that selecting an elliptical halftone
type can improve skin textures in photographs. Although mainly used
in PAINT, the same technique is possible when printing photos from
DRAW. It did, indeed, improve the skin tone in a photo printed to
an HP-4M laser printer. Halftone types may adversely affect the
vector objects in the artwork, so youll need to experiment
with specific choices for every project.
For your own experiments with the halftone pattern on your laser
printer, throw a Tinted Grayscale lens over full-color art before
printing. Set the lens color to black. Then print your file, opening
the Separations page and selecting Print Separationsbut print
only the black plate. You can then experiment with the angle, frequency,
and halftone type settings on your composite image to see what interesting
effects you get.
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Prepress
The options on this page are relevant when you are making film or paper
separations from your DRAW document. The various prepress marks are turned
on automatically when you enable the Separations check box on the previous
Separations option page, and these marks will print outside of the page
margins. This means that if your DRAW document page size is the actual
size of the media used to print on, the marks will not be visible. Why
would you want to print something thats not visible? To that question,
we pose another question: imagine if it were visibleimagine if all
of those marks printed within your page.

No, the idea here is that the paper or film you are imaging onto is larger
than the size of your drawing. That way, you can accommodate all of the
important marks that this dialog offers, and more importantly, objects
that must bleed. So you will either need to use one of the oversized pages
supplied by the printer driver, or set the page size in DRAW to be smaller
than the standard 8½ by 11. (And if you have to fit printer marks
to the current paper size, stay tuned...)
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