dbeach at klikmaker.com wrote: > I would like to find out how much of this can be done with Open Source > apps. I have a sample page from our current catalog at:
The answer is usually "all of it - but how quickly and how well?" . For some tasks the current OSS apps are ideal, and for others they presently fall somewhat short in that you must use more cumbersome production methods or workarounds for technical limitations. The best way to find out whether your task will work smoothly and well is to try it, something it sounds like you're already working on. > So far, I haven't been able to puzzle out how to make those blocks of > copy in my sample, with tabs and rules under each line. I also do not > know how to use The GIMP to generate CMYK TIFFs with clipping paths. You don't need to. You can simply use RGB images, and have Scribus do the colour managed conversion to CMYK on PDF export. For this you need a good press profile and a reasonable idea of the nature of your source images, but you need one of those to get a good result out of Photoshop's CMYK conversion anyway. This takes some getting used to as an idea, but it's probably the best workflow with open source tools at the moment. It's also the direction all the commercial stuff is moving in, as CMYK conversion gets pushed back further and further toward the press its self (for very good reasons). The unfortunate bit is that the GIMP not only lacks the ability to save a CMYK image, but at present also lacks the ability to use your press profile to warn you about out-of-gamut areas. Scribus can help here, though it's gamut warning can be overly cautious for some types of image. As an alternative, you could look into CinePaint or Krita for your CMYK editing work. As for vector images - Scribus supports fairly decent SVG, EPS and (in development versions only AFAIK) WMF import. There are some caveats if your printer requires PDF 1.3 (which lacks transparency support) but it should generally work well. -- Craig Ringer
