[Scribus] Re: CMYK Question

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-08-10 at 23:22 +0100, Alastair M. Robinson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> scribus-request at nashi.altmuehlnet.de wrote:
> 
> > My childrens' school wants to put a colour advertisement in a local 
> > newspaper and has created it in a <shudder> Word document. However the 
> > newspaper is wanting CMYK and the school is asking me for help. Can 
> > anybody think of a way, preferably with open source tools, to convert a 
> > colour RGB Word document into a CMYK pdf ( or ps, or eps, or anything else)?
> 
> I have this trouble all the time at work - both with Word and Publisher 
> files.
> 
> What I tend to do is print to a dummy PostScript printer (I set up a 
> "Publisher Survival Kit" dummy printer with zero margins for this 
> purpose), and load the PS file into GIMP, through GhostScript.

In my experience that is *NOT* safe with MS Word. Word loves to silently
substitute fonts, and rearrange the page to fit the selected printer.
You might be able to get away with it if, and only if, you're using the
same version of Word *and* you have all the fonts used by the client. In
most cases you need a printer config with the same paper size and
margins too (crazy, eh?).

Personally I'd recommend that you do this only as a last resort, and
only if you can get a fax / image proof of the document from the client.

At work we just refuse Publisher documents flat-out - "fax us a printout
of the job, then send us any text content and images as separate files -
not in Word documents - and we'll recreate the ad". If you don't say
"not in Word documents" you tend to get six MS Word documents, each with
a single image in it ... *sobs into hands*.

--
Craig Ringer