[Scribus] 2 questions

[John Culleton]

On Thursday 20 March 2008 08:54:35 am Timothy Boyden wrote:
> Yeah that is what I thought also. Any good commercial printer must
> be using a software package that does automatic flattening of PDFs
> in the Prepress stage of their workflow, I know it's set as one of
> our traps. When we finally get around to installing Kodak Prinergy
> 4, it will be using the Adobe PDF rendering engine and
> transparencies will no longer be an issue.
>
> -Tim
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: scribus-bounces at kirsche.altmuehlnet.de
> [mailto:scribus-bounces at kirsche.altmuehlnet.de] On Behalf Of Craig
> Bradney
> Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 4:34 AM
> To: D. R. Evans
> Subject: Re: [Scribus] 2 questions
>
> > I finally reached their "PDF expert" and chatted with him.
> >
> > So the real scoop is that problems are caused if you use
> > transparency anywhere in a PDF.
> >
> > "OK so the issue there is that transparencies simply are not
> > supported
> >
> > in
>
> a
>
> > high speed commercial digital print environment.
> >
> > they need to be resolved to the final pixel--ie flattened"
> >
> > So my experience is that if you make use of transparency
> > anywhere, it
>
> might
>
> > or might not work with scribus "out of the box".
> >
> > Their first recommendation for Linux users is to use GIMP :-) but
>
> otherwise
>
> > if you use transparency anywhere then you MUST flatten the output
> > if you want it to work reliably.
> >
> > (Incidentally, one of the other tech support people there also
> > mentioned that one should use PDF 1.4 or earlier.)
>
> What sort of rubbish answer is that? If they are going to "support"
> PDF 1.4, then they need to support transparencies.
>
> Ok, Scribus needs to get a flattener built in at some point,
> (patent mine-field, btw), but they need to recheck their specs.
> With PDF now at 1.7, I doubt 1.3 is going to be used "by default"
> by most unknowing customers in the future.
>
> Craig

LSI wants interiors with color to be built to the PDF X/1:2001 
standard which is about PDF 1.3 in antiquity.  It is alleged that 
they search for this tag line in the pdf.  They are by far the 
biggest digital printer in the US. 

Covers with LSI may be a different matter but transparencies like 
those used in the Freedom Yug tutorial may still cause problems. 

If there is no way to "flatten" a file in Scribus what would be the 
most useful external flattening program to use for a: Linux and b: 
MSWin? 

Gimp won't output anything with CMYK color model (other than 
separations) so that won't help.  Will ImageMagick flatten files?


-- 
John Culleton
Resources for every author and publisher:
http://wexfordpress.com/tex/shortlist.pdf
http://wexfordpress.com/tex/packagers.pdf
http://www.creativemindspress.com/newbiefaq.htm
http://www.gropenassoc.com/TopLevelPages/reference%20desk.htm