Hi List, Having made an ad in Scribus to be printed in a local magazine, I am a bit confused about some aspects of preparing a PDF to send to a printer.
That is apart from the "your PDF is malformed" which turned out to be "we can't handle embedded TTF, only Type1" :) My confusion is with the CMYK model. Of course in the precious little information they give they simply insist everything has to be in CMYK. No more info, no output profiles, PDF versions, anything about the printing process, just "no RGB!". I have tried the following with and without color profiles, results are mostly the same. - Use an RGB PNG in Scribus, export as PDF to Printer (no CMS), which according to "identify -verbose mypdf.pdf" outputs a CMYK PDF. The problem is, the image is really flat (same with CMS actually). I thought well it's still OK, so sent that. They (printers) said they could not fix the image because brightening it only throws away more of what color is left. - Use ImageMagick to convert the PNG to a CMYK jpeg (and use in Scribus, export to PDF for Printer). Firstly this gives a blue-inverted jpeg I seem to remember from the CMS docs. Resulting PDF is still not cool, has the same blueish tint. - Use ImageMagick to convert the PNG to a CMYK tif file (and use in Scribus, export to PDF for Printer). This gives an entirely different, much darker, slightly better, but still not acceptable result. Export to RGB PDF gives a perfect picture obviously. Somehow the red text and logo manage to show up perfectly red in all PDF's, screen and printer, under all circumstances, (and they printed to the same perfect red), but then they manage to show up in brown if I enable CMS (even though they print to red). The red logo surviving is intriguing because if I gimp together a full spectrum image (i.e. rainbow gradient left-to-right) and use that in the ad, very few of the colors survive the CMYK export, even with CMS for my monitor (supplied by manuf.) and .. random printer? I don't know what printer they use. I know the conversion is supposed to affect the colors a bit, but I have here 4 different results (more if CMS variations are included) depending on input, and even 2 different CMYK conversions of the same PNG depending on JPG or TIF output format. Basically - what I thought I'd do is output the result to a CMYK PDF where the CMYK is simply the mathematical conversion from RGB, without any profiles or gamut considerations or throwing away information. I'd then trust the printer's system to make a reasonable -not perfect- print of it. But the PDF itself already looks bad -before they even look at it- so I must be doing something wrong somewhere :) Any tips? Cheers, Dennis
