Quoting Matt Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Aren't there issues with free implementations of CMYK that require some
kind of fee to be paid?
Nope. CMYK is way over a hundred years old. Any patents are long gone.
The problem in implementing CMYK is (as Alex mentions) technical, not
legal. CMYK is the opposite to RGB, mathematically speaking, so you
need two paths for colour in your application. Even Adobe took some
time to get this right in Illustrator, and you can't mix the two
colour models in Adobe product documents.
If Inkscape or Gimp were really serious about professional mass
adoption, they would drop everything else and work on colour spaces
until they have at least CMYK, Hi Fi (e.g. Hexachrome) and spot (e.g.
Pantone) colour support atively.
This is the *single biggest thing by far* that prevents Free Software
tools being taken seriously for professional design use. I cannot
overstate its importance. But of course SVG doesn't support CMYK,
which is insane, so Inkscape can't really support CMYK without
extending the standard (which is very tempting). Gimp should though.
It's as if graphic designers were trying to write an operating system
and telling programmers "we're not adding mass storage support because
you don't need to use disk drives, you can just keep your computers
always turned on and store stuff in memory".
It is that frustrating.
Maybe that's just Pantone(R).
Mmmm, Pantone... Yes they are very proprietary, don't try to add their
colour definitions to your software. Lovely hues though. ;-)
- Rob.
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