On Wednesday 15 September 2010 13:53:11 Michal Suchanek wrote:
On 15 September 2010 19:17,
<inkscape-devel.neophyte_rep@...2295...> wrote:
Can we try this again?
Who, among those active in this thread, actually produces Inkscape data for printing on a regular basis?
I must say I don't. I am satisfied with screen output or color laser printouts without color matching if I want some text with color diagrams for reading offline.
What does your print service know about this issue? (Assuming you've asked, of course.)
When it comes to small print services operating on tight budget I can imagine they know next to nothing, or that not all of the staff is competent.
The requirement to send CMYK PDF as input is then something I would understand. If you send a CMYK PDF tagged with the correct profile they can see that as a proof that you checked what the printout will look like. You can't say there was a gradient in the picture you sent and it's flat in the printout, it will be exactly what you sent, and they don't guarantee more.
Especially they won't send/show you previews, do test prints, etc. because it costs money for material and/or salary and they would be more expensive than competition if they did.
If they are really incompetent they can even require it just because everybody else does.
Note that this is all mostly speculation but I have seen a print shop with no competent staff and heard quite a bit of complaints from people who actuall try to get things printed. Obviously this would also vary in different places.
I guess it all comes to picking the right print shop for the job. Pick any two: fast, good, cheap.
Thanks
Michal
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Let's work backward again. To sell a book you need to have it on Amazon and available to other online bookstores. The most cost- effective way to do that is to print it via LSI and set a discount of 20%. That way you have no inventory cost and no shipping costs. As books are sold Amazon will replenish their stock. As books are sold Amazon will pay the publisher.
LSI wants either a tiff or a PDF file for the cover. In PDF the file should be in the format PDF X/1-a. If not they will preprocess it, rasterize it and probably degrade the appearance of text and bar codes. PDF X/1-a doesn't allow for RGB.
Fellows and gals, I just didn't make all this up. Those of us in the world of self and small publishers have wrestled with these problems for years and came up with the above minimally acceptable solution, not because we love LSI but because Amazon won't deal with individual publishers at anything like a reasonable discount. You can indeed use Amazon Advantage, maintain a stock of books at Amazon, pay for shipping and, oh yes, give Amazon a 55% discount.
To get on Amazon etc. at a reasonable profit level one has to use LSI. To use LSI and have a decent looking cover without double rasterization you have to give them a pdf X/1-a file. They really prefer if you use Acrobat distiller but thus far I have gotten away with files exported from Scribus 1.5.0, the bleeding edge version which features PDF X/1-a export.
You don't get to pick other printers. Createspace (Amazon subsidiary) wants 40% discount. Other printers have no direct entree into Amazon.
So that is the problem situation. It must be LSI and if it is LSI it must be PDF X/1-a.
Let's work on the solution for Inkscape, shall we?