Abstract: A digital screener for digitally converting a continuous tone color separation into a corresponding high resolution, bit-mapped, raster scanned halftone separation of an original artwork which utilizes a contone line buffer (913), an image handler (930), a screen handler (950), and a font memory (970). For every successive micro raster that is to occur in the screened image, the screen handler repetitively generates appropriate sampling coordinates, using predefined fast and slow scan incremental values, in order to sample any of the halftone reference patterns along successively positioned angled sampling lines (710, 730) that collectively form an angled grid so as to provide a bit-mapped halftone image pattern oriented at a desired screen angle. The font memory stores a different halftone dot pattern for each different contone value.