[Scribus] text is in color, picture isn't

[Plinnell]

On Thursday 01 July 2004 21:35, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> I am designing labels for a skin cream and related products. I drew the
> logo in color using Sodipodi, exported it to PS and converted it to EPS. I
> wrote the text in Scribus and included the picture. I printed it. The
> picture came out in grayscale, but I can change the color of the text and
> it prints in color. If I print to a file and view it onscreen with
> kghostview, both the image and the text are in color. The printer is a BJC
> 6000 on a computer running CUPS. The only clue as to why it's wrong is that
> the text is in CMYK and the picture is in RGB. How do I fix it?
>
> phma
Hi,

For starters, you are using a conversion process which is less than ideal:

1) Scribus has a very good and improving SVG importer. My testing, even with 
rather complex drawings from Inkscape, shows excellent results. Caveats: the 
SVG and the PS text model work quite differently, so text import is the most 
difficult to match. But things like gradients and blends are getting very 
very close. 

2) I recommend Inkscape over Sodipodi, for several reason, but notably 
Inkscape is trying very hard to match the written SVG specs. Scribus depends 
on "well-formed" SVG for import. Both Illustrator and Sodipodi add some 
non-spec extentions.

3) The EPS/PS export from both applications ( they share common code, Inkscape 
was forked from Sodipodi)  is not exceptionally strong and the Inkscape 
devels will acknowledge that, even with the recent improvements in CVS 
Inkscape. I have found it difficult for example to get Acro Distiller to 
distill EPS or PS files from either, indicative of weak EPS, PS output.

4) For EPS/PS viewing, GSview is in my strong opinion the best available on 
Linux, but with the caveat that the display will always convert CMYK to RGB 
screen colors. I do not even bother to install any others.

So, in your case, I would export "plain" SVG from Sodipodi or optionally 
export a high res PNG. Then import into Scribus. This will keep your colors 
in RGB and when printed, will probably match the screen fairly closely. A BJC 
6000 is more than likely an "RGB" printer in that it expects RGB data and 
either the driver or printer firmware does the conversion to CMY or CMYK 
internally. Few inkjets are true CMYK printers.

Another way for close matching is to export a PDF and print using kprinter or 
XPP with the gimp-print drivers which can do subtle tweaking to make the 
colors match very closely.

Hope that helps,

Peter