On Sun, 2003-10-26 at 20:56, Pierre Jarillon wrote: Le Dimanche 26 Octobre 2003 22:55, Giuseppe Ghibò a écrit : > > IMHO the main obstable is the Pantone proprietary system. > > This problem must be solved to allow free software used by > professional printers. But I can't imagine free inks :-( > > If ever you have only a shadow of a solution, tell us, please !
Probably the solution is to allow software ike GIMP to import files supplied by Pantone, Inc., which people wanting to use commercial print services would have to pay for. If you're paying for a print run of 5,000 pictures of nude politicians, the cost of the colour pallette is relatively small. Having said that, there are a lot of other things GIMP would need to compete with PhotoShop in the professional pre-print world... Some that spring to mind include * trapping, colour separation, undercolour removal, hexachrome support (this is where the printing press has 6 colours), duotone and tritone support, controls for bleed and dot gain, together with support for generating files at any given lines per inch (this is not the same as dpi, it's for screening, and control over screen angle is needed) * support for reading PhotoShop files (there's some of that already) * maybe support for PhostoShop plugins? Not sure how possible this is We'd also need something like Illustrator... sodipodi doesn't cut it... and Quark, where neither OpenOffice nor scribus is there. I think we're several years away from being able to consider Linux as a strong platform for graphic design work. In the meantime, it really isn't worth fighting a battle with people who use PhostoShop for a living, as they're not going to move to Linux. Choose battles you can win, and win them :-) Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
