On Sep 15, 2010, at 11:15 AM, Chris Mohler wrote:
The unfortunate reality is that since I do not get to choose my printing service (as a freelancer), I must conform to what said service wants - and it's almost *always* generic CMYK.
No, since there is no such thing as "generic CMYK". :-)
They usually need *a* generic CMYK colorspace. For work in North America that would default to SWOP. However, for other countries the colorspace and the numeric values will be different.
Yes it's entirely broken, wrong and terrible - but in order to use Inkscape for color work I need to be able to work in a generic CMYK color space (coated SWOP for example),
Bingo!!!!
You need a *specific* CMYK colorspace. This is usually specified via an ICC profile such as SWOP or ISO or SNAP. In this case "SWOP CMYK" (I'd assume v2) is the specific 'generic' CMYK.
At the moment Inkscape lets you work with such proper CMYK, but the export drops it.
and be able to embed that profile into output PDF and EPS formats. I also need to be able to specify CMYK ink levels for particular colors (100%K vs 60%C 40%M 40%Y 100%K). Spot colors are a must (think metallics, or embossing).
Yes. EPS is a bit dated, so getting such output into the proper type of PDF is key. The scribus guys have given me several sample files that I'm working on breaking apart technically so we can have good examples for the Cairo guys to be able to tune their API to support.
But... recent versions of Scribus have started to support CMYK ICC from Inkscape-generated SVG files. They don't support quite all the SVG features we do... yet. However if the SVG gets *in* to Scribus successfully, then Scribus will do a very nice job getting profesional PDF output.