Hello ladies and gents,
I work in a print shop. We do a lot of work with a printing press as well as our digital machines. Whenever we design something digitally that has grayed areas or logos, and we want to print it using our press, we need to make sure the shaded areas have "dots" so that the ink from the press will spread evenly.
In CorelDRAW X4, I used to to have it sent to the general PANTONE uncoated palette. After selecting the gray area, I would double click the color box at the bottom right, bringing up the fill window. From here, I selected the Options drop down menu, then PostScript Options. Here I could set the dots and the frequency.
Now that we've updated to CorelDRAW X5, the palette options are quite different. I want to have one centralized PANTONE unocated set that stays for everything I work in. And the big problem, is that when I do find a good gray to use (after clicking through way too many choices), the PostScript Options is grayed out and can't be clicked on.
Is there someone that can help with this? It is very necessary for our business and any assistance would be much appreciated.
-Tyler
Postscript textures still exist. From the help file (this is X4 so double check the X5 help to confirm):
But I don't think the postscript textures were ever intended to be used as a method of generating halftones. I've always thought of them as ways of generating visible patterns -- for example, if you wanted the user to "see" a discernable black and white polka-dot pattern rather than a shade of grey.
The good news is that you probably do not need to do it -- because halftones are normally generated automatically when you print a document containing tints -- whether that is tints of CMYK or a pantone. Provided you are printing to the correct print driver for your platemaker or imagesetter it should generate good halftones by default.
You can change the halftone settings if you need. Look in the separations tab of the print dialogue. Make sure print to separations is on and decide whether you want spot colours or process. Select "Use Advanced Settings". You should then be able to edit the screen frequency and angle if needed.