[Scribus] Scribus and CMYK PDF

[Andreas Speck]

Craig Ringer wrote:

> 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.

It's not that much - mainly a 4-pages tabloid paper 4 times a year, plus
several A4 publications. It is only the tabloid which will be printed
professionally, and the printers want CMYK PDF. As we all are basically
learning by doing, we already had problems sometimes with RGB images in
Quark created PDF files (our fault), and I don't want to redo the entire
publication with Quark when our printers call us that there is some RGB
in there...

>
>> 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.

Thanks - but I don't think our publication volume will allow us to buy
PitStop - going open source is not only a political decision, but also a
financial one... and for the printers: well, we needed to opt for a
cheap option here too, so I'm not sure how much they can do...

>
>> 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.

I'll check with our printers. I only opted for PDF/X-3 because that was
the only one where I could find how to convert to CMYK... The other PDF
options didn't ask me to use a profile for CMYK... (using 1.3cvs).
However, checking again I just used the printer option for PDF, and the
printer is set to use EuroScale Coated... and ImageMagick again tells me
it is CMYK... Maybe someone can check if it is OK... (sorry,
http://www.pdfcity.com/index.htm seems to be down). I would then trust
that it also works with other files...

>
>>  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.

That's even better than our old version of Quark... Makes it much
easier, especially as Gimp doesn't have color management yet, so letting
Scribus do the conversion would be brilliant...

>
> -- 
> Craig Ringer

Andreas

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