> I do the whole thing (imposition and RIP) with ghostscript, pdftk, psnup and > ps2pdf, plus a little driver program that I wrote to count pages and do the > donkey work.
>From what I remember (I can not check right now, don't have the tools here at work) Scribus will create a pre-separated CMYK PDF if you choose "Output intended for: Printer". At least Acrobat will show the separations in the Output Preview (I only have Acrobat Standard 7 here at work, Professional is needed for Output Preview). But maybe Acrobat will show separations even if the PDF is not pre-separated? And I'm not sure you need to have it pre-separated, I think Ghostscript can separate it anyway. Then you could try to do the imposition on the PDF instead of postscript. I understand it might be harder than with psutils (I wish someone would write pdfutils, with the same syntax as psutils). I think jPdf Tweak can do it, though it has a different syntax and I am not sure if it can be run from the command line (I haven't used it a lot, just looked at it). The key element here is: How do you get the print to your plates? What is the final format before the stuff is put on the plates? Ghostscript can separate a CMYK PDF into TIFF for each layer (it will separate both process colors as well as spot colors into separate files). So if yon can use TIFF for your plates I think this is the best way. /Peter
