Hey Bulia, Mental, Bryce, Alan and all you other active inkscapers!*
There's a feature request for cmyk and spot colors somewhere in the bug tracker. However, if you guys could spend some thoughts on how it might be implemented in inkscape that'd be cool. I'm using inkscape for semi professional work (doing work for ESTIEM, which is the European organisation of students of industrial engineering and management, as well as some stuff for our students government...** and usually need the stuff printed by professional printers who are asking for cmyk profiles. Now since the native format of svg just is rgb, I wonder (as I did in the bug tracker) if it is possible to define the colors used in the defs and add a cmyk equivalent in a inkscape tag. The user would manipulate the cmyk equivalent and inkscape would recaculate the rgb value... something like that.
Then on ps eps or pdf (see below) export, the cmyk values would be embedded instead of the rgb values.
Now concerning pdfs. I tried to import my svg flyer to scribus. That worked fine, really, exept that fonts weren't recognized, but the workaround is to convert them to curves. Now scribus 1.2 really screws up on resizing groups in a way that they exceed the page boundaries... causing me to start all over again a few times. Then -- as I was warned -- gradients with the end points of the object are not exported to pdf and the color output viewed with adobe acrobat afterwards seemed really poor for cmyk. This is why I'm very much hoping for smoothly working pdf output directly from inkscape. That would just be so cool, and for me a lot more important than many other things you can work around (oh well, baseline grid would really (!) help as well -- yes Corel doesn't have it, but that doesn't mean you don't need it :-) --, but other than that inkscape is already such a good app)
Ok I know you're busy, but I needed to put this down, because I just talked to another ESTIEM designer about PR stuff and am wrapping up a document where I mention Inkscape (along with Corel and Freehand and Illustrator) as the program of choice for vector editing. Saying this, can I point to some gtk installation tutorial? I know there is a setup now for inkscape, but don't I also need the gtk stuff first?
Anyways, take care!
David
*not sure what I'm so emthysiastic about but I'm in quite a good mood.
** silently I'm hoping to convert all the ESTIEM designers to Inkscape and (in some point in -- the not to close -- future) to Scribus -- oh, btw, Microsoft is one of our three headsponsors :-) Yes, there are nice people at Microsoft, would you have guessed so? But that doesn't always mean the create great software.
On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 10:36, David Christian Berg wrote:
There's a feature request for cmyk and spot colors somewhere in the bug tracker. However, if you guys could spend some thoughts on how it might be implemented in inkscape that'd be cool.
Now since the native format of svg just is rgb, I wonder (as I did in the bug tracker) if it is possible to define the colors used in the defs and add a cmyk equivalent in a inkscape tag. The user would manipulate the cmyk equivalent and inkscape would recaculate the rgb value... something like that.
I think the right way to do CYMK and possibly spot colors is to implement support for ICC color profiles. They're part of the SVG standard, and use would basically look something like this:
fill:#ff0000 icc-color(genericCYMK, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0);
i.e. after the normal color specification, SVG permits an icc-color() which can specify a color in an arbitrary ICC color profile. This works pretty much anywhere in SVG that you can specify a color.
The catch is that you can't really just say "CYMK" any more than you can "RGB" -- there are many CYMK color profiles, just as there are many RGB color profiles (at least for RGB, SVG specifically specifies sRGB).
I don't know what a good real standard CYMK color profile ("genericCYMK" is just a placeholder) would be.
We might also be able to cope with spot colors in that way, giving each spot color its own ICC profile or something. Not sure what the best course of action there would be.
In any case, note also that the as yet unfinalized SVG 1.2 is expected to have some additional support for CYMK and spot colors, but I've not had time to look into the specifics yet.
-mental
MenTaLguY wrote:
I think the right way to do CYMK and possibly spot colors is to implement support for ICC color profiles. They're part of the SVG standard, and use would basically look something like this:
fill:#ff0000 icc-color(genericCYMK, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0);
i.e. after the normal color specification, SVG permits an icc-color() which can specify a color in an arbitrary ICC color profile. This works pretty much anywhere in SVG that you can specify a color.
Probably the next step is to get some test cases and whatnot so as to help determine what's the right thing to do. We'll probably want to get a good overview of the "proper" thing, and then temper it with a little pragmatic "common practice" of the leading packages.
To this end, my first page of Google results hit a company that does PDF<-->SVG conversion stuff, and has examples and trial stuff http://www.mattercast.com/ I'd suggest looking into that and trying out a few things. At the very least we can get some idea of how it's being addressed today by others, and maybe help Inkscape produce stuff friendlier to their product.
See if you can get some PDF's with the stuff that you want and then feed it through their tool to see what the SVG ends up like, and vice versa.
We'd probably also want someone with recent versions of Illustrator to do some experiments also.
(I had a more detailed response, including how we need to finish the internal color cleanup first, but the draft got sucked out into the ether...)
Jon A. Cruz wrote:
http://www.mattercast.com/ I'd suggest looking into that and trying out a few things. At the very least we can get some idea of how it's being addressed today by others, and maybe help Inkscape produce stuff friendlier to their product.
Trying to be fair and not play favorites, here are the other Google hits on the subject (I only scanned the first 10 pages of results):
http://www.pdftron.com/pdf2svg/
Collect a few example files and we'll see what hoops we can get Inkscape to jump through.
:-)
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 23:29:09 -0400, MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> wrote:
In any case, note also that the as yet unfinalized SVG 1.2 is expected to have some additional support for CYMK and spot colors, but I've not had time to look into the specifics yet.
It's good that you mentioned it.
http://www.w3c.org/TR/SVG12/#controlling-color-space says:
SVG 1.2 adds a new property to give increased control over the color space used for rendering.
The SVG Working Group are considering removing this new feature from SVG 1.2 due to lack of interest. If it is removed it may be considered for future versions of the SVG language. If you have a need for this feature in the short term, please give feedback to the SVG Working Group. The same applies if you have implemented the feature.
So, are we really not interested? :-)
Alexandre
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, David Christian Berg wrote:
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:36:30 +0200 From: David Christian Berg <david@...407...> To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-devel] cmyk-profile and pdf export
Hey Bulia, Mental, Bryce, Alan and all you other active inkscapers!*
Saying this, can I point to some gtk installation tutorial? I know there is a setup now for inkscape, but don't I also need the gtk stuff first?
GTK installation should not be a problem when it comes to using Inkscape. The windows binaries already come packaged with everything included and if you should already have GTK included with your distribution (although if you are compling from source you may need to grab a few extras to be completely up to date).
** silently I'm hoping to convert all the ESTIEM designers to Inkscape and (in some point in -- the not to close -- future) to Scribus -- oh, btw, Microsoft is one of our three headsponsors :-)
Yes, there are nice people at Microsoft, would you have guessed so?
Just the same as some countries can have leaders most of the rest of the world strongly dislikes but still like the people from that country, so too does Microsoft have some very nice and very brilliant people working for them. Unfortunately business interests and profit are put before doing a good job and providing something people actually want comes a distant second.
Anyways, take care!
David
*not sure what I'm so emthysiastic about but I'm in quite a good mood.
Glad that Inkscape is working well for you.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ Inkscape, Draw Freely http://inkscape.org Free SVG Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, David Christian Berg wrote:
There's a feature request for cmyk and spot colors somewhere in the bug tracker. However, if you guys could spend some thoughts on how it might be implemented in inkscape that'd be cool.
We discussed this a bit at the original Scribus/Inkscape IRC meeting, and there should be a summary in Wiki. We had identified littlecms as something that should be investigated for Inkscape to tie into. I don't think anyone is actively working on that presently; if you'd like to push this area, perhaps you could do some research and experimentation with littlecms to scope out what we may need to do to implement support for it in Inkscape?
A good place to start would be updating / expounding on the InkscapeColor page in wiki. Add some of your ideas for handling cmyk there. Also look at the ColorPalette page, that captures some earlier (pre-Inkscape) ideas for colors, that may tie in with or be replaced by your ideas.
Now since the native format of svg just is rgb, I wonder (as I did in the bug tracker) if it is possible to define the colors used in the defs and add a cmyk equivalent in a inkscape tag. The user would manipulate the cmyk equivalent and inkscape would recaculate the rgb value... something like that.
This may tie in with the underlying CSS in Inkscape, which isn't very flexible currently (in fact, style.* really needs to be gutted and completely redesigned.) Ideally, it should be possible to define new styles, so a user could select several shapes and assign a property (such as a named color), and then tweak the style definitions separately.
Then on ps eps or pdf (see below) export, the cmyk values would be embedded instead of the rgb values.
Now concerning pdfs. I tried to import my svg flyer to scribus. That worked fine, really, exept that fonts weren't recognized, but the workaround is to convert them to curves. Now scribus 1.2 really screws up on resizing groups in a way that they exceed the page boundaries... causing me to start all over again a few times. Then -- as I was warned -- gradients with the end points of the object are not exported to pdf and the color output viewed with adobe acrobat afterwards seemed really poor for cmyk. This is why I'm very much hoping for smoothly working pdf output directly from inkscape. That would just be so cool, and for me a lot more important than many other things you can work around (oh well, baseline grid would really (!) help as well -- yes Corel doesn't have it, but that doesn't mean you don't need it :-) --, but other than that inkscape is already such a good app)
Easily asked for. ;-) This is one of the many frequently requested features, so I'm sure it'll get done eventually. What we really need is a developer who is gung ho on implementing good svg->pdf conversion algorithms.
Perhaps Cairo may be a path to explore here... hmm... David, could you investigate the Cairo tools and see if there is a commandline tool that does good SVG->PDF conversion? If so, that may provide the need without us needing to do additional development. :-)
Ok I know you're busy, but I needed to put this down, because I just talked to another ESTIEM designer about PR stuff and am wrapping up a document where I mention Inkscape (along with Corel and Freehand and Illustrator) as the program of choice for vector editing. Saying this, can I point to some gtk installation tutorial? I know there is a setup now for inkscape, but don't I also need the gtk stuff first?
Hmm, the gtk stuff should get installed automatically if needed. In certain cases maybe you'd need to install Gtk separately, but I'd expect that at that point you're beyond where a tutorial would be of help. ;-)
Bryce
participants (6)
-
Alan Horkan -
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Bryce Harrington -
David Christian Berg -
Jon A. Cruz -
MenTaLguY