[Scribus] CMYK or Sending to a Printer

[Rob Miller]

On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Dennis wrote:

> So, I installed this profile (as well as Adobe's standard profiles) in
> Scribus, enabled CMS and set up the monitor profile.

I've been looking into this for a little while as well.  I have no 
experience generating CMYK output for external printers, but here's some 
things I think I've worked out:

> 2 things happen:
>
> - If I enable gamut checking, literally every single color turns to gray (as
> in out of gamut), except maybe a single shade of cyan. (this is in pictures,
> text, and Scribus' own color palette).

tifficc and jpegicc come with lcms and have a show out-of-gamut option; I 
find the same all-gray output playing with profiles using it, and have 
about convinced myself that gray means 'in gamut', while the other colors 
I occasionally see mean 'out of gamut'

> - Without gamut checking, but on-screen print checking, pictures are washed
> out, but somehow text entered with Scribus is not. (i.e. I can not import any
> decent color in any picture, but red text in Scribus is red).

I get this also with qimage under wine, with a variety of profiles.  I 
suspect that it reflects that images -are- washed out in print compared to 
on the monitor.  This shouldn't keep your external printer from being able 
to do a good job, however.

> When I export to PDF, set for Printer, the result looks great in acroread -
> but according to identify it is an RGB PDF, not CMYK. I am not sure if the
> printer people want that. (all RGB PDF's look great in acroread btw so I
> could have just as well exported for Screen without any CMS?).

When you export PDF with CMS off, identify reports a CMYK file (though it 
also says "Image generated by ESP Ghostscript (device=pnmraw)" on mine, so 
identify may not be completely trustworthy for PDFs).  With CMS on, 
identify reports RGB, but also note that the only profiles in the list 
under the 'Colour' tab are input and monitor profiles (at least on my 
Gentoo scribus 1.2.1cvs).  If you want output (printer) profiles, they are 
only an option if you set the PDF compatibility to PDF/X-3, then look 
under the 'PDF/X-3' tab that becomes enabled.  Note that the 'Save' button 
becomes disabled for this until you put something in the 'Info' string for 
the document.  Now, from looking at and playing with the code, none of 
this appears to use lcms to do any image/profile transformation -- I 
-think- the ICC profile just gets embedded in the PDF output file.

I further suspect that Linux Acroread 5 and xpdf don't know anything about 
ICC profiles in X-3 PDF files, so they just dump the file out as normal 
RGB.  The wine install of acroread 6 dies telling me I need to install 
IE5.01, surely something I've always wanted to do :-).

Whether your external printer can handle X-3 PDFs is unknown at this end, 
but since he didn't know what CMYK profile to suggest he probably doesn't 
know either.  For your earlier question about what (random) printer 
profile to use, I would probably try Photoshop5DefaultCMYK.icc (which I 
must have got from some free set of profiles somewhere on the web) rather 
than some random printer profile -- but again I've never done what you're 
trying to do :-)

Another avenue you might explore would be printing to a postscript file 
and then seeing if either your printer can accept that or if you can 
accurately convert it to PDF.  With 'use ICC profiles' enabled under 
advanced options, this (I believe!) applies the selected input and printer 
profiles to the images etc. before they go into the postscript file.  The 
postscript file will not look at all right displayed on your screen, but 
then it is in the CMYK colorspace.

Good luck, and please let us know what works!

rob.