halftone_screen — PRINTPATH npr op

• Data kinds: image2d → image2d

• Call: import fullseye as fs; fs.ledger.halftone_screen(image, lpi=60.0, angle_deg=45.0, pixel_um=25.4, sharpness=8.0) (to call the implementation directly, import printpath; printpath.halftone_screen(image, lpi=60.0, angle_deg=45.0, pixel_um=25.4, sharpness=8.0); from the registry, opsprintpath.get("halftone_screen"))

Usage

A classic rotated halftone screen — dots whose area carries the tone.

Thresholds the image against a rotated periodic spot function (the product of

two shifted cosines, the classical round-dot screen). *lpi* is lines per inch

and *pixel_um* the pixel pitch, so the screen frequency in pixels follows the

printing convention rather than a bare "period in pixels".

★Why this earns its place: two screens at different angles beat against

one another, and the period and direction of that moiré are a closed form

(:func:halftone_moire_period) that can be predicted *before* anything is

drawn and then measured out of the image. That is why newspaper printing puts

the plates at 15°/45°/75° — the beat is pushed to a frequency the eye does not

resolve — and this op lets that be shown as numbers, not folklore.

Parameters

----------

image : 2-D array in [0, 1]

Tone; 0 prints solid, 1 prints blank (the ink is `1 - image`).

lpi : float

Screen ruling, lines per inch. Newspapers use 65-85, magazines 133-175.

angle_deg : float

Screen angle. The classical set is K 45°, M 75°, C 15°, Y 0°.

pixel_um : float

Pixel pitch in micrometres (25.4 um = 1000 dpi).

sharpness : float

Edge hardness of the dot; large values give a hard threshold.

Returns an `image2d`: 1 = paper, 0 = ink.

Raises `ValueError`: non-positive lpi, pixel pitch or sharpness; a screen

period below 2 px (it would alias — reported, never silently drawn); a

non-finite or oversized image.

Limits: this is a *screen*, not a printer. Dot gain, ink spread and

registration error are not modelled, so measured ink is the geometric

coverage and will read lighter than a real press.

Detailed usage guide

• printpath family guide

References (sample data, literature)

• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).

• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.

• The canonical algorithm (author, year) and its uses are named in the family usage guide above.

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

• poc_beats_fringes_and_screens — py -3.11 examples/poc_beats_fringes_and_screens.py

• poc_print_registration — py -3.11 examples/poc_print_registration.py

Ops the type connects to (they accept image2d as input)

stipple_points_from_image · stipple_energy · stroke_tone_error · engrave_lines · hatch_field · mosaic_tiles_sites · mosaic_tiles_render · print_layer_defect_map

Same category (npr)

halftone_moire_period · engrave_lines · hatch_field · mosaic_tiles_sites · mosaic_tiles_render


*Provenance: printpath.py — PRINTPATH operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*

© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.