On 15 September 2010 18:29, John Culleton <john@...1202...> wrote:
The physical printing press will either use spot colors or the process colors of CMYK. That is the target. That is how modern printing presses work. They mix those four colors and not Red Green and Blue. So I suggest:
- Use CMYK from the beginning to develop a print document. This gets
around the smaller gamut problem.
- For exact colors don't depend on a monitor representation,
calibrated or no. Take the CMYK values and look them up on e.g. Galaxy Color Gauge Color Pro. This still won't be "exact exact" but it will be the closest you can get without having the printer produce a proof copy.
As my father used say, don't fight the problem. Printing presses use process colors AKA CMYK. Work backwards from that.
Well, they actually don't. Most at least half-professional print shops work with six colors or more to make the available color space somewhat less limited.
The really professional ones can mix you custom colors or load colors that can't be represented in any sane color space known so far like shades of gold color.
Still if your print shop insists on CMYK PDFs there is no reason to deny them that output so long as they give you the profile and Cairo gets the feature implemeted (or somebody hacks it as addon to inkscape if they must).
Thanks
Michal