How to print using the risograph Mac printer driver

To send digital files to a risograph machine for stencil/master making, from a Mac computer, first view your file (eg. in Preview, Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.) and go to the top menu and choose File > Print and open the Print dialog.

Printer: Select the riso machine as the printer from the list of printers. (If you don't see it here, try these tips for installing the riso mac printer driver.)
Paper Size: Pick the size of the sheet of paper for the machine -- for example, A3 or Tabloid 11 x 17 inch.
If it's the first time printing, add your ink colors in the Print color entry dropdown. In the color list on the left column, select the ink(s) you have and click the Add -> button to move them to the Print color column on the right. Hold the shift key to select multiple inks at once.

All the main settings needed for printing are in the Coloring tab of printing. For example, you might choose the Photo Grain-touch option.
For a two color print on a dual drum machine, you can make masters for both drums at once by sending a two-page PDF file to the printer. The first page makes the master for the first drum, the second page is for the second drum. To do this in the printer driver, pick Master Making > Both Colors and Use color separated data. That’s described in more detail on page 24-25 of the Printer Driver Manual for MF-9450.

For two drum machines, There is a bug in the Coloring section, where if you are in Both Colors > Color Separated Data, it won't let you switch to Mono-color printing until you reset the dropdown from "Color Separated Data" back to "Auto".

Other tips

Sometimes you want to just make the master on the drum in position 2. To do this, from the Coloring tab, select Dual-color print, and then Master-making: Color 2 only.
Presets: (at the top of the print dialog, below printer selection) - it makes things faster to make presets for combinations of colors settings and paper sizes that you use a lot. One note is that the Scale setting is not preserved by presets.
Pages: Selected Page in Sidebar is very handy for multi-color prints, when printing from a PDF viewer like Preview. This lets you work with a PDF with all the colors for a page in one PDF file, where the PDF has 1 page per ink color. Then, select only pages for the color(s) you are making masters for, and send them to the printer to make the stencils.

Printing Color Halftones on the Mac RISO driver

In the Mac driver, there's no line angle setting like there is in the windows driver, which makes it impossible to do multi-color halftone screening from the Mac driver dialog alone. Many people with networked risograph machines use the Windows driver because of this major limitation. Mac users can run the Windows print drivers via a windows virtual machine, for example using Parallels for Mac, or similar software — or printshops will have a dedicated old Windows laptop to send the print files from.

However, you can print halftones from the Mac driver if you pre-bitmap your images into halftones and then print those files on Photo Grain-touch. You can use Photoshop or the Mac appSpectroliteto halftone your images prior to printing.

This tutorial originally appeared on ameliagreenhall.com and was written by ANEMONE.