[scribus] PDF Colour separations

[Peter Nermander]

> 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