[scribus] Printing in gray

[Jehan Pagès]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 5:36 PM, Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com> wrote:
> On 12/09/2014 10:55 AM, a.l.e wrote:
>> hi jehan
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 8:23 AM, Rolf-Werner Eilert
>>> <eilert-sprachen at t-online.de> wrote:
>>>>> An old laser printer: HP color laserjet 2840.
>>>>>
>>>> Why do you make a CMYK instead of a standard color PDF?
>>> I had a problem with my printer, so I wanted to print just some
>>> cyan/magenta/yellow/key shapes alone to test them and see if it could
>>> help me diagnose; and I thought I could do so with Scribus by using
>>> CMYK colored rectangles. It turned out printing from the PDF generated
>>> from Scribus, I had some yellow in some other shapes, so I figured
>>> there was a problem (which I could see, since I had the printer
>>> problem).
>>> And printing from Scribus itself, I had grey levels instead of colors
>>> (a problem I already encountered so I usually don't print from
>>> Scribus, but tried again, just in case).
>>>
>>> Isn't it supposed to be possible to make a document with CMYK colors
>>> in Scribus and get it printed with the CMYK composition directly to
>>> the home printer (so if I say "Cyan only" color, I want only the cyan
>>> toner to be used)?
>>>
>>
>> i'm not 100% up to date on the topic nor a color / print specialist...
>> but from what i used to hear in the past, consumer printer expect to get
>> RGB (and the internally convert to CMYK for printing). so, if you feed
>> them with CMYK, the driver will first convert the file to RGB and let
>> the printer reconvert it to CMYK.

Ok so basically the problem is that home printer's drivers are not feature-full.

Actually I discovered that the test page from the OS (Linux Mint) is
what I wanted to do in Scribus (print elements with just 1 ink for
test), so that means that the OS is able to request directly a
specific CMYK mix (though to be honest, by then my printer "magically"
worked again — I think it is an intermittent mechanical problem — so I
could not be sure whether the colors I see on the test page are
actually a mix or 1 ink, but I assume this is 1 ink, otherwise this
test page is a meaningless lie).
If that is the case, maybe the OS bypassed CUPS, as Andreas Vox
proposed in another email on this thread.

>> if this is true, no, it's not possible to print cyan only on a consumer
>> printer.
>>
> But from what I understand, when you print directly from Scribus,
> whether or not colors are RGB or CMYK shouldn't matter.
>
> Ultimately, this should be a solvable problem.

Yes it feels a little stupid that home printers are CMYK and we are
not able to directly "speak" CMYK colors to them. On the other hand,
working in RGB is good enough in most cases. But for all the times
when a user want to specify colors in CMYK, for whatever reasons, if
there exists a solution, it would be awesome for Scribus to implement
it.

Jehan

> Greg
>
>
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