[scribus] CMYK problem

[Bert Driehuis]

Dear Rolf,

> In my Scribus, Fogra39L would be in the list of profiles if Color
> Management was activated. Color Management is not activated, and as far
> as I remember, it wasn't on the old system.

That's easy to check, because it is a document setting. If you
document opens in Scribus and Color Management is not activated, it
was not saved with Color Management active. Unfortunately, relying on
defaults is quite error prone in the CMYK world. I always activate
color management when I deliver CMYK to the printer.

> By the way, Scribus itself offers "Artifex CMYK SWOP Profile" as
> default, but maybe it's just because it's the first one in the list.
> There are quite a lot of different options to be adjusted when I
> activate color management, and I really don't know what to choose for
> any of them. It always ran out of the box, so I never cared.

I feel your pain. I learned to care after a few misprints, but it
still isn't my strong suit. In my experience, most printers will be
happy to help if you have questions though.

My current understanding is that you're always safe if you set the RGB
and Monitor profile to "SRGB", and the CMYK and printer profile to the
profile your printer recommends. I never touch the other settings.

> Maybe the reason is in Ubuntu's printing system which is completely
> different (if not only newer) than on the old Suse system. But on the
> other hand, Ubuntu is so popular that I would expect more people to run
> into problems here.

There are significant changes in every major Ubuntu release. I found
the Ubuntu Bionic distupgrade a relatively painless upgrade from
Ubuntu Xenial, but that was because the major changes included
autoconfiguring my printer driver for me (whee!). Also, Linux in
general is quite sensitive to stuff you may happen to have installed,
in some cases as a side effect of software you weren't aware included
color management.

But, bottom line: CMYK printing is not for the faint of heart and
spelling out the details of color management is very important to get
reproducable results.

With kind regards,
Bert Driehuis