[Scribus] CYMK problem

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 21:23 +0200, Cor Pernot wrote:
> Hi Christoph and Louis
> 
> I was confused too, so I spoke again with people in the printshop. Why does my 
> pdf not print well? (yes Christoph, I had used 'printer' in the pdf color 
> settings). 
> They told me that if they would do the job,  they would first 'translate' a 
> jpg file to contain CYMK information (with photoshop they said).

That's rather unusual. However, if they're using QuarkXPress for a
poor-man's imposition suite, then they will have to convert PDF input
into some other format, since at least in older Quark versions (which
many people still use) Quark's PDF handling was awful.

Here's something I wrote a little while ago on that:
http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-July/011976.html
That whole thread should be informative; it started at:
http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-July/011970.html

> This jpg file would go into Xpress and a good pdf is the result.

It's very weird that they're using JPEG. The best choice is most likely
to make an EPS from the PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro and importing that.
Failing that, a CMYK TIFF. Why would you use a JPEG? *shrugs*.

> I do not understand why they to this separate translation. Does Xpress not 
> create a pdf with colors in the CYMK colorspace?

It's a bit funny about placing PDFs on the page. What you normally do is
make the PDF into an EPS, then print to PostScript from Quark and run
that through Distiller. That essentially passes the EPS through Quark
with little fuss, retaining all the right colour info, not mangling text
and fonts, etc.

That's how we print PDF ads supplied by clients here.

Note that that's not the same as exporting an EPS from Scribus. Scribus
doesn't currently produce EPS output of the same quality as its PDF
output (in my experience, anyway), so I'd favour making a PDF then using
Acrobat Pro to convert it to EPS.

> So I am looking how to translate (RGB)?- jpg (stemming from a scanned 
> photograph) to CYMK-jpg.

CMYK JPEG is not well supported. I would strongly recommend using CMYK
TIFF if you must use a raster image format.

> I will experiment with the tiff format (from GIMP) and the possibility I saw 
> in Photoshop to choose for CYMK there.

Photoshop should be able to rasterise a CMYK PDF to a vaguely sane CMYK
TIFF. Don't let GIMP near your document  if it involves CMYK, though, as
there's just not enough CMYK support.

> > This is a strange thing that happens in many small shops. They try to
> > use QXP (Xtensions) for everything, including impositions and
> > separations. The result are problems that would not occur with Acrobat +
> > PitStop or other well suited programmes.

Seconded and then some. I think I've ranted about this before (see
archives) as have Peter and others.

--
Craig Ringer