OK, I'll bite ;) The issue is a bit more complicated as it seems to be at first sight (as it probably always is).
Disclaimer: I'm describing the issue mainly from the Scribus point of view, but I think it may be even more complicated for other projects (or not, as I may very well be mistaken). Let me first describe the status of emulating background colours in Scribus. It's rather primitive, as it only permits to define an emulation of the printing material based on a Qt colour dialog (RGB/HSV values). What we need instead is a database of colour values of real-world colours of printing materials, and these must not be restricted to paper, even though paper would be a good start. It hasn't been exactly a secret, but I didn't publish my efforts so far, so here's a short description of what I've been doing wrt Free software/standards recently: I have sent emails to about 300 colour vendors all over the world (the exception being Pantone, as we all know their stance). In addition, I also spent countless hours on the phone with negotiations. The results are more than promising. While some major (and also some minor) colour vendors of all sorts (not just ink, but also glass or plastics) agreed to make their colours available to Scribus, sometimes in return for being mentioned as a supporter on our website, they did so under Free licenses (most of them BSD-style). This means that most, if not all FLOSS graphics projects will be able to use these palettes in the future. I hope you keep this message low-profile for the time being, but the real message is: Please send me links to every paper manufacturer you know of, so that I can ask for colour values (ideally at least D50 and D65). In my experience, most paper vendors don't have such values available, and in this case, we need someone who can actually measure the colours and provide the Create projects as well the respective vendors with the results (remember the principle of "do ut des"). Paper would only be a first start, of course, as there are other materials (e.g. FOREX, textiles, different kinds of packaging material) that serve as a printing background. As said above, just send me links (and, if possible, some background info), and I will start a mailing action, as well as using the phone, if necessary. In addition to what I wrote above, we may have to think about an open format for emulated backgrounds. Or would existing formats suffice, and we'd only need to care to place the background colours/surfaces in another standard directory? Jon Cruz: It's your turn ;) Cheers Christoph _______________________________________________ CREATE mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
