[Scribus] CYMK problem

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi Cor,

here is another non-technical solution to your problem: change the printer!

I had similar problems in the past, i.e. studios who produce plates for 
printers as an additional source of income. I worked for a company which 
had chosen a printer that didn't make the plates himself, but let it do 
by contractual partners. When the company history I wrote was finished 
in all its glory (in Scribus!), the studio received the PDF. Shortly 
thereafter, the guy who was supposed to do the RIP complained about that 
"broken" PDF file. Either fonts were not printed or colours were wrong 
and so on. The same happened with the cover, made by a studio in the UK 
(in FreeHand). The reason was the use of Quark. I asked him to use 
Acrobat and appropriate software instead, but he claimed he had never 
done this before and that it always worked fine with their own files.

I immediately called up the company and the printer to let the plates be 
produced by someone else. They did, and with Acrobat + PitStop 
everything worked just fine.

As a general rule, don't look at the price for a print job only. You 
also /have/ to talk to the printers. With a bit of experience, you will 
learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, just by talking.

An example: Currently, I am preparing a travelling exhibition which 
contains about 60 presentation boards (ca. 1 m x 1 m). To get the boards 
produced, I had to solicit bids for the printing. One of the bids was 
significantly cheaper than the other ones. When I called the company, 
they told me that the only accept high-resolution TIFFs (1200 dpi) for 
presentation boards. My question about pixelised fonts and other vector 
data was answered: "That's no problem, our RIP uses interpolation". At 
that moment, they lost, because I know how presentation boards made with 
bitmap files look like. They didn't accept PDF or EPS, not even PS, and 
that's why I chose the next bid, which prefers CMYK-PDFs.

groeten,

Christoph