[Scribus] I've got an RGB printer...

[Tino Schwarze]

Hi there,

I figured out something curious which is probably worth sharing: I'm
owning an RGB printer. Although I'm sure that my Samsung CLP 550 prints
using CMYK since I installed the toner cartridges myself, it seems to
work with RGB internally.

I came to this conclusion after printing some sheets from Altona Test
Suite. One of the tests involved a CMY gradient which was printed using
only black with no C, M nor Y.

Lately I figured out how to print CMYK files so that they match what I
see on screen. If I simply print them via Scribus, colors are far too
saturated. Exporting to Print PDF and printing from Acrobat Reader 5
helps a bit, but it's still far away from what I see on screen. But best
quality is achieved if I export to PDF (Print) and embed the CIE RGB ICC
profile for both images and colors, even though all colors and images
are CMYK. How's this possible?

I'm running Scribus 1.2.1cvs with the CMYK patch applied. (And I don't
dare to upgrade since it works).

Keep up the good work!

Bye, Tino.

PS: Not sure whether it is in the docs; I've had a print shop complain
about the PDFs (and even EPSs) I sent for an ad - they're using Quark...
As a last resort, Ghostscript 8.5 can produce CMYK TIFFs like this:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDevice=tiff32nc -r600 -sOutputFile=output.tif input.pdf

(As a side note, ImageMagick seems to be handle CMYK files quite fine as
far as no colorspace operations are involved, so cropping is possible.
I'm still longing for full-featured CMYK-capable image manipulation.)