Arrangement for determination and evaluation of ink measuring strips on a printed sheet on a measuring table by a densitometer

To sense the positions of ink measuring strips on a printed sheet and to scan the ink measuring strips with a densitometer, the printed sheet is placed on a commerically available digitizing board of the kind including a manually operated stylus and the densitometer is mounted on the positioning head of an X-Y positioning mechanism secured to the digitizing board. Preferably, the printed sheet includes position indicating marks which may be scanned by the stylus so that the position and orientation of the printed sheet with respect to the digitizing board is sensed. For repetitive testing of a number of printed sheets using the same format or arrangement of ink measuring strips, the format referenced to sheet coordinates is recalled from computer memory and transformed to the coordinate reference of the digitizing board using coordinate transformation coefficients based on the sensed position of the printed sheet with respect to the digitizing board. The format is, for example, determined by scanning the first printed sheet for a new format, transforming the sensed positions of the ink measuring strips to coordinate values referenced to the printed sheet, and storing the transformed values in memory. Preferably, the digitizing board includes a menu region for selecting various scanning, storing and recall functions.