[scribus] [Gimp-developer] GIMP PDF export plugin

[Andrew A. Gill]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2009, peter sikking wrote:

> Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
>
>> There was a somewhat heated discussion of this thread at
>> linuxgraphics.ru forum and here are several examples from people who
>> deal with prepress work on daily basis:
>>
>> 1. Client brings an image for poster in CMYK which needs color
>> correction. Urgent work, not time to ask him to redo it. Double color
>> space conversion is out of question. So he had to use Photoshop from
>> VMWare.
>>
>> 2. You have a newspaper where first page should have a two-color
>> photo: black (C=0%M=0%Y=0%K<=100%) and blue (C<=100%M=0%Y=0%K=0%).
>> separate+ however separates black to 4 channels.
>>
>> 3. Some print houses set limit to overall sum of colors, for example
>> 180%. So if you take Cyan 100% + Magenta 100% (already 200%) + a
>> little of K and Y this will result in unnatural colors in a newspaper.
>>
>> 4. Live density control for each CMYK channel is a must (Scribus/SVN
>> has that in preview dialog).
>>
>> To me it's somewhat strange that GIMP's product vision doesn't mention
>> prepress needs explicitly.
>
> A vision is an expression of the project of what they want
> the software to be.
>
> There is choice in there, and the user community cannot demand
> that GIMP does certain things. For instance making web mockups
> (including the required html + css generation) is explicitly not
> supported.
>
> Now what about that prepress. I think it is fairly safe to say
> that scribus' vision is to be prepress-king and GIMP should watch
> it not to want to overlap too much in that department. Everything
> in the above examples that reeks of newspaper, publications or
> multiple pages is a job for scribus. They want to do this.

Scribus is vector-based, not raster based.

I do not believe that Scribus has any intent to be allow 
raster-based editing, but I could be wrong.

I have CC'd the Scribus list.  Let us hear their opinions.  Does 
Scribus intend to allow people to tackle the problems listed 
above?

Or would you be able to trap the following image with Scribus?

<http://www.ets.ru/images/pk000075.jpg>

> The vision does speak about creating original art and I am all for
> it to bring this original art to the printing press. And not via
> the print dialog (I am also mr. openPrinting) but those printing
> presses that have operators. From the description above you can
> see what is should be like: first you create the art, then you
> bring it to the press. Mix master tape (in rgb) and then cut
> the lp (in cmyk).

As someone who works in prepress, I can tell you that when we 
take it from original artwork to press, we have to run any raster 
artwork through Photoshop or a competing product.

-- 
| Andrew A. Gill     To ensure continued quality of service,   |
|                    this e-mail is being monitored by the NSA |
| <superluser at frontiernet.net> <http://www.needsfoodbadly.com> |
                                                               --