Screen printing positives through Flexi

[Jen Goodwin]

Is anyone using Flexi to print positives to the Edge? I have a few issues that I e-mailed Scanvec about and nobody has gotten back to me.

One being....when I am printing a gradient halftone along with something solid, regardless of it all being printed jet black...it prints the gradients separately!?!? I wouldn't care, but it seems to put a 'glowline' around the solid objects where they should just butt against the gradient. A little outline that is NOT in the design.
It'll print a solid halftone all in one shot, with no little outlines, but add a gradient and it considers it something separate.
What gives? Am I missing some setting in the rip or is this just the way Flexi handles the gradients?

I love that Flexi will give me angles on my halftones...I seriously wish Gerber would add that to Omega!! It would be great for screen printers.

 

[screener24242]

how are you ripping the halftones? flexi is not ideal for this application. try illy, corel or photoshop. how are you creating your seperations?

 

[Jen Goodwin]

Ripping through Flexi's Rip and Print. Flexi 8 does a fairly nice job at regular halftones. I can set my angles to make sure I don't get moires on the screen and it's been working well...until I get to a one color with gradients. Then I run into the issue I mentioned. I have all those other programs....but I love edge positive, I love how dark the Edge prints my positives and lets face it, I pay enough for my Edge that it's nice to multi-task it. Plus, I already have most of my screen printing customers stuff set up in Flexi for their sign work - so it's easy just to stay in Flexi if I can get it to work. I have only recently started playing around with printing to the edge through Flexi.
I separate manually in Flexi for spot color printing and Flexi's rip will even separate 4c process nicely if using a jpeg. I already printed a job that way.
Hmmmm. That's interesting. Maybe if I try printing this one color job as a jpeg, rather than in vector form I won't get the outline and it will print all as one rather than printing the gradient and going back and printing the solid.
I'll have to give that a go later.