A while ago, Máirín blogged about creating print originals in Inkscape and Scribus, and I can only chime in on her praise of these tools. Since I joined Imendio, a large amount of what I’ve done on a daily basis have been print work (stickers, t-shirts, rollups, tattoos etc.) and all of it have been done using a free software workflow!
A common obstacle you run into when using Scribus for print is the lack of support for predefined spot colors from Pantone, something that usually comes handy when you need more exact colors that you looked up in a color swatch. The reason that Scribus can’t include these is, as usual, because of legal reasons.
Luckily there exists a small howto in the Scribus Wiki how to get hold of and use these in your designs.
It’s too bad we still have to rely on Scribus for the very last part of our workflow. Not because it’s a KDE app but it behaves so much different (read: not as smooth/usable) as most GNOME apps. I think Inkscape can progress a lot on this area.
Hylke: First – it’s not a KDE app! Second – what do you find not smooth/usable enough in Scribus? OK, it’s a DTP app so it has to be a little bit different – mainly because people are used to some other concepts. IMHO it’s workflow (hmm, a better word would be “concept”) is not so much different as it was in Calamus on an Atari STe, availible even for relative newbies. I agree that some things may be rather hidden, but usability is a continous process – the wiki and bugtracker (and/or mailing list) is waiting for your opinions
Thanks for the this article, really helpfull. BTW: a interesting PDF document for the HKS/ RAL/ CMYK conversion:
http://www.steinbacher.de/download/Farbtabelle_HKS_K_RAL.pdf
http://www.jesusda.com/projects/colorpalettes/index.html#pantano
pantano is a color palette similar to pantone for gimp, krita, inkscape, maybe scribus, it’s a free software developed by jesusda
Hi for all people…nice art.