Dear all, So, back in 2004 while working with the teams of Scribus, actually did put together a workflow for myself, on a professional project, on how to output camera-ready, print-production files for printing plants.
more importantly, how to do it with india's unique printing press workflows, where inks may not be standard, exposures on plates could be an issue, and ink-gains and other technical nitty-gritty are unique and localized problems. etc etc. and as hiran points out, with cmyk transforms. hint: inks ain't pixels. yup, there are ways of doing it. very lengthy, quite elaborate, a lot of attention to detail required, lots of stumbling blocks (indian language font-rendering and encoding and typesetting; large-format print-production) but something mainstream is possible and doable. super-condensed form: 1. install a color management system (important) 2. calibrate your monitor (more important) 3. set up GIMP with special plugins and engines for CMYK 4. move to 8 bit workflows only. though i did use cinepaint those days for deeper bit-depths. 5. use inkscape. 6. use scribus 7. choose professional-quality fonts. not all are. so check on fontsquirrel.com 8. you will also need pdf utilities, PDF Editor, some commad-lines ones, 9. FontMatrix. 10. have a postscript printer on-hand, for some proofs. 11. the big problem though is pdf rendering on your screen, the viewers ain't that great for professional quality. 12. learn to concatenate or break apart pdfs. get page-numberings right. 13. move from rgb to cmyk, though, it is actually acceptable to use RGB today. 14. embed ICC profiles into your workflow. very important step. 15. render fonts if they create problems, or postscripts break. 16. very tricky and complex layouts, import into inkscape render completely into high-res 300ppi png, export via GIMP after color-correction into JPG, and embed back as dumb-pixels. that's making the flow idiot-proof. 17. pay for pre=press proofs, which should not be on digital machines. this is a costly option depending on your budgets. or do fall back on digital proofs. 18. take specs of ink-gains, dot-gains, and other stuff and find clever hacks of putting them in, for example ink-trapping is a thinking-process more than a technical script. and there are still many more similar hacks and inventive approaches you'll take to find solutions to unpredictable problems. and when in some situations everything just fails, er,.. emmm.. hmmmm boot into mac. or outsource. regards n
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