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Evolution of a 100% Free Software-Based Publisher
NewsForge (also owned by VA) has a quick and interesting look at the evolution of a 100% free software-based Italian publisher. From the article: "Today, Sovilla acknowledges that choosing a 100% free software workflow complicated his working life. He also notes, however, that a great part of his troubles came from an early start, at a time when programs such as Scribus weren't mature enough yet. Today, he says, the situation has improved considerably, and publishers who are willing to experiment with an alternative software platform can, and should, try it without fear."
UF is a great comic, but I'm not sure if illiad knows that Gimp has a CMYK plugin. the site claims its only rudimentary support, but it is a start.
http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml
Short answer: Because printers don't use red, green, and blue ink and ink on paper is not an additive color model. The colors used for printing are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, in a subtractive color model. The visible spectra the the two models produce is different, which means that sending RGB values to a CMYK printer usually results in the colors being off.
Process color offset lithography (used for the vast majority of commercial printing) is a 4 color, CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) process.
The RIPs (Raster Image Processors) that produce, proofs, film, or plates expect (in many instances require) images to be in the CMYK colorspace (four 8-bit channels). So, lack of robust CMYK support makes the GIMP largely useless in a print production environment.
Some questions:
Did you use the latest version ?
Define "immature" ?
What is your professional qualifications to make such a judgement ?
I will just point some relevant links:
The "hobbyists" - NOT: The Scribus Team bios. There are a handful of people who are involved with Scribus who have extensive experience in publishing, pre-press and image engineering among others.
Capabilities: Scribus Specs
(In the users words) Success Stories: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Success_stories
Made with Scribus
Press Reviews
Despite the naysayers, there is a growing interest from publishers both large and small in open source software - not just the back-end server stuff, but yes even the desktop tools... Things like the overwhelming success of events like www.libregraphicsmeeting.org and the open sourcing of Xara are concrete signals the arrival of open source what was once strictly proprietary domain.
Bottom line is: RGB is additive, ie you start with black and add light to get the mix you want. Paper is reflective and so you start with white sunlight and subtract colours to get the mix you want. Thus cyan absorbs Red, magenta absorbs Green and yellow absorbs Blue - the opposite of RGB. Theoretically you could get black by mixing CMY but in reality making the primary colours accurate enough to do that is impossible and black is added to the system to make things easier.
This all means that there are colours you can see on an RGB monitor which are impossible to show with CMYK (not difficult - impossible) and vice-versa. CMYK is not the ultimate either, due to the same imperfections of the primary colours that make black impossible, and something like 60% of Pantone colours can not be shown using CMYK.
So, converting from RGB to CMYK can be tricky and causes some surprises to the unwary when they get a colour proof back and discover that their nice shade of deep green has come out bluish. Since printing is mostly in CMYK, this means that you need some form of colour management system to warn you if your colours are going "out of gamut" and to automatically adjust others to look right on paper.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Yes, it's hideous. He's used OpenOffice.org as a typesetting tool. The quotes aren't even sexed . A great shame that he decided to use a word processing package for typesetting, when there are excellent open source typesetting packages out there (TeX, Groff, and Basser Lout, for example). This kind of approach really isn't going to make many inroads into the publishing industry: the results look godawful.
By way of comparison, I have before me a copy of sed & awk (Dougherty & Robbins, O'Reilly Press, 2nd ed., 1997). It tells me that "Text was prepared in SGML using the DocBook 2.1 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at ORA by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output."
And that was NINE YEARS ago (though the first edition was in 1990, and I'm guessing it was typeset similarly). If nine years' progress in publishing with free software consists of replacing that stack (and its beautiful output) with OOo, something is very wrong.
Addison Wesley for one. The American Mathematical Society for another. It is still used for technical content, though DocBook is making inroads, too. Its clean separation of content and layout makes it ideal in many places where frequent layout changes are made and conventional DTP applications are nightmares. Since LaTeX directly generates typesetting formats (e.g. Postscript, DVI), it is not much harder for them.
I know that Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas have used LaTeX for every one of their books. They have some home-grown macros to make compiling and checking the example code automatic. This just cannot be done with Word or FrameMaker and is critical for eliminating copy errors.
For papers or books where the content is quite complex
Actually RGB is a wider gamma than CMYK, any CMYK color can be accurately represented in RGB but not vice-versa.
In the old days, image editing/retouching for print often involved performing operations on specific channels to achieve specific effects (ie adjusting the levels of the magenta channel to remove a color cast in the shadow tones or whatever).
Also, in the old days, your source digital image came from a drum scanner which generally produced a CMYK image.
With increasing acceptance of CCD flat-bed scanners and even digital photography, high end print production is gradually moving to a RGB workflow, at least for image editing/retouching.
Still, every time an image is proofed or printed, it needs to be converted to CMYK. Depending on the environment, this can done by applying a "profile" in Photoshop or many RIPs now support "color management" which is sort of broad term which aims to convert images to the appropriate color space on the fly using device profiles.
As other posters have noted, lack of CMYK support, while a glaring problem, is really just the tip of the iceberg when considering the GIMP for professional use.
Calling this guy a publisher is stretching it a little, imho. The website looks somewhat shoddy and homegrown.
... Ah, well, it's open source, so it's not that bad. Allthough I'm beginning to suspect that Typo3 is some brigdehead for a Danish Invasion of Germany of some sort. I recall we had some kind of war something like 110 years ago or so. Must be that there's still some stuff not settled yet. And Kaspar Skarhoj probably is some secrect agent of the danish crown. :-)
There are other publishers using OSS exclusively that deserve the term. For instance T3N, a regular german magazin on Typo3 uses the CMS Typo3 as publishing tool. They generate the digital prints by Typo3 driven PDF generation. And the bi-monthly 80 Page magazin - available at every larger Newspaper dealer - , albeight having a slightly 'technical' 2-column layout, is a full-blown professional publication, and not just some fanzine. That's what I call OSS driven publishing.
Oh, and, btw, if your wondering why in heavens name someone would have the wacky idea to publish a magazin on Typo3 like others publish magazines on, let's say, PHP or Java, you might be interested to hear that T3N is just in it's 3rd issue and is growing *fast* and steep in print run volume. That is because in Germany _*EVERYBODY*_ uses Typo3. Everybody. Which is unfortunate for me because I'm trying to make a living in Germany doing web developement and don't like T3 that much.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca