[scribus] PDF Colour separations

[Gregory Pittman]

On 05/22/2012 08:56 PM, Frank Cox wrote:
> To this point, I have been creating plates by printing to a colour-separated ps
> file, then doing an imposition from that into four pdf files (one for each
> colour) then printing each pdf file to the appropriate series of plates.
> Unfortunately, ghostscript blows up once in a while using that output due to, I
> think, poor quality fonts being used in the original document.
> (10,000 Fonts for $1.49!)  Unfortunately, I can't persuade the folks who create
> this thing to stick to using good quality fonts (I've tried several times) so
> I'm stuck with the consequences.
>
> I am now considering the idea of starting from a pdf file instead of a ps file
> (not knowing if the output will be any different or better or not) but have
> discovered that there is no obvious way to create a colour separated pdf file
> in Scribus.  Export to PDF has several options, none of which appear to do what
> I can do by printing to a ps file.
>
> So my question is, how can I get a set of colour separated pdf files out of a
> Scribus-generated PDF file?  I see that ghostscript now supports a tiffsep
> device, but that will give me a series of tiffs.  Should I go with that and use
> tiff2pdf to create my pdf files for the plates?  Or is there a better way?
>
> Or am I wasting my effort here and won't gain anything different by starting my
> imposition and colour separation from a PDF instead of a ps file?
>
Something I tried and can't really say I succeeded at was printing 
separations to a PS file, then importing this to Scribus as a vector file.
I just created a very simple document with a single photograph.
The hitch I got into was that there seems to be something wrong with the 
importation of the PS files, since they're clipped -- i.e., the entire 
image did not show. Something of a workaround was to ungroup the PS, 
which gives you 2 overlapping boundary boxes, and they seemed a bit out 
of line, which was apparently the source of clipping. One ungrouped box 
was labeled Image2 and the other Group1. If I enlarged Group1 I could 
then see all the image. (Incidentally, if you then try to ungroup the 
box labeled Group1, Scribus crashes with Signal 11*) If you fiddle with 
the Image2 box you may mess up the proportions.

That file could then be exported as a color separated PDF. The trick 
would be coming up with a method to make sure the separations are lined 
up properly on the various separated PDFs.

Not sure if this addresses your question since I wasn't sure about the 
workflow you had done, but guessed you were using an external utility.

Greg

* don't know if this is a bug, since it seems a rather unorthodox workflow.
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