Custom Halftone Problem with Rampage RIP


We have been printing a book that makes extensive use of custom
halftone screens (to simulate a very coarse screen effect on certain
images) successfully for a number of years with a major print vendor.
We have recently switched to another major print vendor (both big
players in the U.S. market) who uses a Rampage RIP, and they say that
they cannot print custom halftone screens, as their RIP no longer
supports some "esoteric" PostScript features.

Since the new vendor is offering a considerably better price on these
jobs, my employer wants to make it work, but reworking the images is
problematical because:

1) Images are placed at a wide variety of scaling percentages, so
converting them to bitmap in Photoshop with a 35 dpi halftone screen is
not practical, because the screen size and density changes with the
scaling.

2) The same images are used in various parts of the book (even within
the same chapter files) both with the coarse screen or using the High
Contrast setting to cause the entire screened area to disappear.

So, at the very least, it's a huge headache for something that has just
worked with other printers (and as I said, this new printer is also a
big player in the U.S. book printing market).

Does anyone have any suggestions how to avoid a great deal of selective
reprocessing of about 1000 images?

Does the Rampage RIP really have that limitation, and why?

What about a solution that focuses on modifying the images within the
PDF? I don't see anything in PitStop that would seem to manage it.

Even a scripted solution would require the careful management of a lot
of images that are used several times in different contexts and sizes,
and with different screen and contrast attributes.

Help!!

I would appreciate if you could forward any comments to
rick AT rickgordon.com. Obviously, please replace the " AT " with an @
symbol.
.

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