[scribus] Free Scribus and FLOSS resource on print production with free tools

"Christoph Schäfer" christoph-schaefer at gmx.de
Mon Nov 23 07:25:03 UTC 2015



> Gesendet: Montag, 23. November 2015 um 04:48 Uhr
> Von: "Alexandre Prokoudine" <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com>
> An: "Scribus User Mailing List" <scribus at lists.scribus.net>
> Betreff: Re: [scribus] Free Scribus and FLOSS resource on print production with free tools
>
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 6:44 AM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 
> > I had never heard of this workaround for Pantone color swatches:
> >
> > "If you need Pantone palettes, get them legally from demo versions of
> > Indesign, Quark Express, CorelDraw etc and convert them using
> > SwatchBooker."
> 
> Especially since you can directly get Pantone in SwatchBooker via
> xref. Or use Olivier's script to fetch Pantone colors directly to
> Scribus (via xref as well).
> 
> Alex

The major problem with SwatchBooker is

a) that it's no longer being actively developed;

b) it doesn't run on Windows, despite the availability of a (presumably untested) "Windows version";

c) the Mac OS X version is only available via Homebrew.


Moreover, Pantone as colour reference is crap, and their physical colour fans, chips, whatever, are unreliable. It's a cleverly marketed franchise, which continues to hold the minds of designers captive, thanks to their abiltiy to sneak into design education via licensing contracts with commercial software vendors and thanks to the fact that design education lacks proper instructions in colour science.

The Libre Graphics world has a much better alternative in its hand, namely the Open Colour Systems Collection (http://dtpstudio.de/downloads/OCSC_1_0.zip), which includes two colour palettes using the CIELAB and CIEHLC colour models. Colour fans using this model for CMYK print are availabale for a fraction of the costs of Pantone or any other vendor's references, and they're truly open: http://dtpstudio.de/cielab/shop.php

Pantone's, HKS's and other companies' colour sets are a relic of 80's and early 90's. They should have no place in 21st century design.


Christoph



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