[Scribus] Scribus and CMYK PDF

[Craig Ringer]

andreas.speck at tiscali.co.uk wrote:

>Hi all,
>  before I finally move to Scribus (from Quark) with all our publications,
>  
>
I'm curious about what sort of publications you're doing, actually. 
Knowing who's using Scribus or considering using it is usually of interest.

>I need to be sure that CMYK works fine. I tried today with PDF X/3, and color
>management enabled, and opted vor EuroscaleCoated v2 as ICC profile, and
>it looked fine. ImageMagick (identify -verbose) tells me that the resulting
>PDF is CMYK, although I tried with one image in the document that was CMYK,
>and a second image that originally was RGB (which I normally wouldn't do).
>  
>
I would strongly advise you not to rely on ImageMagick - instead use a 
proper preflight tool like EnFocus PitStop to check the PDFs to your 
full satisfaction. I would never use any PDF tool without checking its 
results out with PitStop now (thanks again to Peter Linnell for pointing 
the fantastic thing out to me). It's a lifesaver in a PDF workflow, as 
it lets you verify PDF documents against a preflight profile, edit them, 
examine individual elements, and do things like colour space conversions 
on individual elements. If you printer is worth their salt they can 
probably send you canned PitStop profiles that let you preflight PDFs 
against their requirements, too.

>Colors don't look brilliant on screen (using Acrobat Reader 7.0 for Linux),
>but good enough for what we are doing.
>  
>
PDF/X-3 may also contain tagged RGB images and IIRC even other objects 
in other colour spaces with attached ICC profiles. Check with your 
printer about whether they support PDF/X-3 . If they do not explicitly 
support it, you'll probably want use standard CMYK PDF instead. In 
general, if you ask your printer if they support PDF/X-3 and they say 
"Pee-dee-eff what huh?" like my printers did, then it's best to send a 
plain CMYK PDF.

>  My main question: can I rely on what ImageMagick is telling me (which basically
>means does Scribus really convert RGB to CMYK on the fly)?
>
Yes. In fact, especially in 1.2.x that's probably the best way of doing 
things - work in RGB and let Scribus do the (potentially colour-managed) 
conversion to CMYK. IIRC 1.2.x doesn't do unconverted passthrough of 
CMYK input images to the output PDF so working in tagged RGB will 
probably be better.

--
Craig Ringer