I don't see a spot for me to tell my current document to be CMYK color space.

Is there some trick to getting this to happen?


I'm using Inkscape 0.47 on a Mac, running it within X11.


thank you!


icat

I'm not sure if this is possible with Inkscape. I think CMYK mode is a raster graphics feature, and Inkscape being vector....apples and oranges, as they say Although I could be wrong....anyone else know?

CMYK, RGB, HSV, et al are color modes. They are not endemic to any type of application. Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, when it was around, and other vector programs do support CMYK and RGB.

CMYK is used by the print market, which still does exist, though you might do work only in RGB color space.

Hi Inkcat! I'll take a stab at your question and maybe the bump will bring along someone else with more info.

As far as I can tell there is no way to get Inkscape to write colours to the xml format in anything but hexadecimal notation. i am not certain but the svg specification may only allow hex.

The 8 digit hex code (e.g. 808080ff) allows three colour 'channels' and an alpha 'channel' but storing CMYK plus alpha would require a 10 digit colour name.

You can certainly choose a CMYK or HSL dialog in the fill and stroke and all colour pickers, but it converts all colors to 8 digit hex as you willl see in the bottom of the picker.

Since RGB and CMYK spaces are both device-dependent spaces, there is no simple or general conversion formula that converts between them. Conversions are generally done through color management systems, using color profiles that describe the spaces being converted. - wikipedia

Inkscape and other apps render a device independent svg file to a monitor or printer as necessary.
Under Inkscape preferences \ colour management there is a field at the top that says display profile and further down one that says device profile. If you don't have any choices here you can hover over it and it will tell you the directories it searches for profiles you might want it to use. If you have icc profiles for your monitor and printer the conversion from rgba might be more satisfying. MAC OSes have very good CMS but I don't have specifics since I am not on a Mac. The prefs might be different as well... You can also choose to have out of gamut colours marked here as you can see and 'black point compensation' although does this mean UCR, UCA, or GCR or something else? who knows.
and lastly If you open the svg file in scribus or other dtp apps the hex will be converted to CMYK according to the current color lookup table and profile if you have any installed . Of course the same is true of your printer, but you might have some more control with the dtp.

sorry if this is not much help (or too much! ) , I would very much like to hear of any answers you come up with.

The color management settings in Inkscape's Preferences dialog are mainly for Display adjustment and Soft Proofing as far as I understand.

To work with different color profiles, you need to attach an ICC color profile to your drawing (in File > Document Properties > Color Management) and use the CMS tab in the 'Fill & Stroke' dialog to store ICC colors in the SVG source. The color profile is not yet used when exporting to other formats (PNG, PDF), but AFAIK current Scribus versions (stable or SVN I don't know) can import SVG files with attached ICC profiles and use the colors as defined in the CMS tab. Scribus offers various options to produce color-managed PDF files for printing.

Possibly you will have to test the 0.48pre1 prerelease version or a Mac OS X development snapshot build - color management features have been reworked and bug-fixed since the release of Inkscape 0.47.

Other references:
Inkscape Wiki: InkscapeColor
Code Wide Open (developer's blog): Inkscape should NOT "support CMYK"!

Very informative ~suv!
You are truly a treasure trove of development info. And if I may say, since I've been thinking it for so long, you are an invaluable asset to this forum, and without a doubt, also to Launchpad.....well, to Inkscape altogether. As an ordinary user, I just really appreciate your contributions to Inkscape

brynn wrote:Very informative ~suv!
You are truly a treasure trove of development info. And if I may say, since I've been thinking it for so long, you are an invaluable asset to this forum, and without a doubt, also to Launchpad.....well, to Inkscape altogether. As an ordinary user, I just really appreciate your contributions to Inkscape

An interesting side note is the reason CMYK support is not natively included in The GiMP due to fear of patent infringement litigation. Its inclusion in Inkscape not only demonstrates more courage than that which is maintained by the GiMP developers, but also proves that their fears are essentially without justification. Adobe is well aware of the Inkscape project and as far as I know have issued no C&Ds.

erroneus wrote:An interesting side note is the reason CMYK support is not natively included in The GiMP due to fear of patent infringement litigation. Its inclusion in Inkscape not only demonstrates more courage than that which is maintained by the GiMP developers, but also proves that their fears are essentially without justification. Adobe is well aware of the Inkscape project and as far as I know have issued no C&Ds.

I don't mean to seem dense, but I don't see where Inkscape has native, or other, CMYK support...I've looked in the areas people have mentioned, but I don't see evidence that it is in there, or that it can be activated.

Would someone be able to help me out with this?

Many thanks! Trying as hard as I can to get out from under the thumb of the Death Star.

i

Inkscape/.svg do not natively support CMYK, CMYK is the coloring method printers use. So to ready the Inkscape RGB based color values you would have to STEP through a another application/utility. Imagemagik and CMYKTool are two utilities that can be used, here is a link to a heathenx tutorial on using Inkscape and RGB to CMYK.
http://screencasters.heathenx.org/episode-106/

Newer (few) printer models are dropping CMYK and either converting to RGB or are placing a RGB to CMYK utility in the printer itself. Last I checked Canon has a SVG (RGB) printer in the works

vwanweb wrote:Inkscape/.svg do not natively support CMYK, CMYK is the coloring method printers use.

You can attach a CMYK (or RGB) ICC color profile to your document (in document properties), and use the CMS tab in the Fill&Stroke dialog. The color values of the linked color profiles will be saved in the object style attributes within the SVG document (besides the fallback RGB hex values). At the moment this color information is not used when exporting to PDF/PS/EPS from Inkscape directly (thus also not used for printing from within Inkscape) nor when exporting to bitmap, but development versions of Scribus can import the color-managed SVG documents and create color-managed PDF files for printing.

Exporting and printing using the attached ICC profile from Inkscape will depend on the development progress of the cairo libraries Inkscape uses for PDF/EPS/PS export, AFAIU.

Native CMYK support does not exist within inkscape, hence the dependancy on Scribus, Cairo, Imagemagick, CMYKTool, etc. Inkscape relies on external utilities to support CMYK. Even though Cairo is ported into Inkscape, a user must still "step" through another application/utility.

Note this new topic:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=5943