On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 13:43 +0530, steve wrote: > > I know what they say - but can they do professional quality colour > > separations? > > Although I do not know anything about DTP. I have heard good things > about > scribus. I found it just a little bit perturbing that you replied back > with a > one word `no` answer without mentioning scribus after making the > assumption that > the OP was indeed looking for `professional quality colour > separations` -- what > if the OP's primary objective is just page layout (which I believe > scribus > handles rather well) and is quite happy with the quality of `colour > separation` > it offers ?
sorry for being abrupt - but this has come up several times on this list and other lists and I am fed up with the discussion. I ran a printing press for several years and used to know what I was talking about - it is 6 years since I closed it, so maybe things have changed since then. Two points I have to make: 1. the question of ups - if you want to make a four page brochure for example, you have to produce a plate with two pages right side up and two pages upside down. Then you print one side of the paper, flip the paper around and print the other side. So if you want 1000 copies of a 4 A4 pages, you print 500 sheets of double A4 size, cut them and you get your brochure. If you have a quad demy press then you can print 8 pages at at time instead of two - hence a run of 1000 sheets (back and front gives a print run of 2000 - which will give you 8000 brochures. Now imagine a 64 page magazine. We used to do this manually, you need to calculate which pages are upside down. Which are left to right etc etc. DTP software needs to do this - scribus does not do this (as far as I can see). It can give you one fold brochure, two fold, 3 fold - but if you want to print on the back also, you need to manually do it. And a book? normal A3 page size books are printed 64 pages at a time - imagine doing that manually. 2. I was one of the pioneers of doing colour separation using coreldraw/pagemaker, laser printer and polymasters. Good enough for newsprint output. But professional colour separation to make 4 colour plates is done by imagesetters - previously on film, now direct to plate and these are run with proprietary software. (this was 2004). And image setters were (and probably still are) hugely expensive. Few presses have them - most go to a professional plate making lab. So what is the solution? PDF is now a standard. Make a high resolution PDF (or even PNG) file and give it to the printer. He will do the rest. > > Please offer the alternatives and if, in your opinion, they are not up > to the > mark, say so. Let the users evaluate and decide what works best for > them. By not > doing this, you are not only discouraging potential users but also > potential > improvement of the app. (would the users bother with reporting bug ? - > who knows > ? but still ...) ok teach - I hope I have made amends now? -- regards KG http://lawgon.livejournal.com Coimbatore LUG rox http://ilugcbe.techstud.org/ -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
