Apologies if I hijack this thread a bit, but it's brought up a question I've been curious about.
Background -- I'm printing intaglio photogravures on photopolymer plates. Like most printmakers these days, I generate digital positive transparencies on an inkjet printer, using the built-in stochastic screening to reproduce tones. As is conventional, I pre-expose the plate with an 'aquatint screen' -- generally a sheet of film from an imagesetter with an ~80% FM screen.
I'm pondering acquiring an imagesetter to generate the digital positives instead of using inkjet; however, RIPs that support FM or hybrid screening are quite expensive. It seems that if a RIP is able to take a high resolution, 1-bit file, then it would be possible to generate the FM-screened image on another computer, and then send the resulting 1-bit file to the RIP to image.
Gordo -- you seem to know a lot about the availability of screening technologies. Do you know whether there's any standalone software to screen digital images (say, TIFF files) using some variety of FM/hybrid techniques, and end up with a file that is suitable to sending to a simple RIP? My preference would be open-source, but a commercial product would be good to know about.
--John