Printing with alternative halftone patterns in ink jet printing to reduce ink penetration

A printing system, comprising:

• a print engine comprising a multi color ink supply and a plurality of print heads;
• a print controller operable to receive a print job from a host system and prepare the print job for printing to a tangible medium via the print engine, wherein the print job comprises a plurality of pixels and wherein the print controller comprises:
• an interpreter module operable to generate a sheetside bitmap of the pixels;
• and
• a halftone module operable to direct the print engine to print to the tangible medium using a plurality of initial halftone patterns and print the print job to the tangible medium based on a subset of the plurality of initial halftone patterns;
• and
• an ink penetration detection module operable to measure ink absorption of the tangible medium and determine the subset of the plurality of initial halftone patterns based on the absorption measurement.

A software program embodied on a tangible non-transitory computer readable medium and operable within a print controller in an ink jet printing system, the software program comprising instructions that direct the printing system to:

• print to a tangible medium using a plurality of initial halftone patterns;
• measure ink absorption of the tangible medium in response to printing to the tangible medium;
• determine a subset of the plurality of initial halftone patterns based on the absorption measurement;
• and
• print a print job to the tangible medium based on the subset of the plurality of initial halftone patterns.