Hi Jelle, This was OT (the thread was about faux font faces) so I changed the subject (continues below)

El 05/03/13 01:48, Jelle Mulder escribió:

As long as Inkscape doesn't really support CMYK, Hexachrome, Spot colours and the like, it can never be considered a truly professional tool for print. SVG supports named colours that might be used to simulate spot colours, but it is a rather small palette and the SVG standard just doesn't support anything but sRGB really. Pantone will not give a license to Inkscape for free I gather as they make a living on this and a good one.

Pantone wouldn't give a license, but they have their books with the CMYK and LAB values in a public website. You can grab their palettes from that website and use them un programs like Scribus (or even GIMP/Inkscape if you convert them from LAB to sRGB). Use Swatchbooker for that.

Also you're assuming that the only print workflow possible is the old early binding workflow (everything in CMYK from the beginning). There are other possible workflows (intermediate and late binding) which are not only possible but encouraged if your target is mixed media.

Apart from that, you mention Hexachrome as a common thing in the industry. I've been working as a designer for 15 years and never needed hexachrome. Clients freak out even when you say them that their corporate colors should be printed as spot plates (which adds extra cost). Most of my clients seem to be perfectly happy with using just CMYK. I can tell you for sure that here in Argentina and probably in all latin america, Hexachrome is not common at all. Probably in some countries it is, but saying that you can't be a professional without hexachrome it's an exaggeration.

Color support can only be done using Inkscape namespaces with the sRGB equivalent in the style or attributes next to it and is dependent on output devises as well. Would be a hell of a lot of work to figure out even a few color profiles and quite some wasted resources for the one who does that. Maybe some university might be interested in doing that or some very progressive printer with deep pockets? The latter at this moment not available in Europe at least or will be hard to find. It's a massacre at the moment.

If you use an intermediate or late binding workflow you don't need to worry much about that. You could do everything in sRGB and send an RGB pdf to print shops that use late binding workflows. You could convert your sRGB stuff to CMYK upon creating the PDF file (intermediate binding). You can do that with Scribus, importing from Inkscape. Of course there's still a lot of room for improvements in both Scribus and Inkscape to polish the exchanche and things could be handier, but it's possible. You can import your SVG artwork into Scribus with a few preparations, and replace the existing RGB swatches with CMYK/Spot colors. Scribus will also read CMYK values if you used the CMS tab in Inkscape to select color managed CMYK values. I agree that it's not the most enjoyable thing in the world with the current UI, but it's possible and with some tweaks it could be ok.

I convert the colors in Coreldraw from a Inkscape PDF export. The only reason I still use it and am bound to Windows.

You don't have to. Scribus can be used for that. I do it almost daily and I send a lot of stuff to offset print every week.

Gez.