Greetings.
I'd like to know what does it mean a design is "print-ready" and how to achieve that with Inkscape. Thanks in advance.
God bless you all.

It means it is ready to print

If someone requested a "print-ready" image from you then I would go back to them ask what they require for an image to be ready to print.

It could be that the document colour mode should be CMYK as opposed to RGB (I'm not sure if Inkscape lets you choose a colour mode.) It might also be that it's in a specific format, such as EPS or PDF.

There are frequent questions on this forum relating to printing (i.e publishing). I think it would be very help if a guide was written for Inkscape and the SVG format, but unfortunately my own understanding of printing is too limited to be the one to write it.

It means it is ready to print

Or more specifically, ready to print professionally, probably.

I don't know much about print design, I read a few books about the process but I've never actually made something for print. I think that the main barrier that Inkscape has is exporting to PDF. Now, I know it's come on in leaps and bounds in this area, but (and maybe it's just me?) when I export to PDF the results are not good. Things like blur and transparency are essential and I don't think they're supported. Maybe that's a limitation of PDF, I have no idea.

I think it would be very help if a guide was written for Inkscape and the SVG format, but unfortunately my own understanding of printing is too limited to be the one to write it.

If someone did this it would amazing and I bet it'd increase the number of people able to use Inkscape professionally (and replace tools like photoshop, fireworks). Does anyone know enough to start such a guide? I'll help if I can... I just don't know much about the process! Even just a guide on how to export to PDF with good results would be an excellent and essential resource. Can anyone do this?

My question was because I want to participate in the FF3 T-Shirt Design Contest but they say the design must be print-ready. I don't know what they mean.

It means that it should be in vector format (SVG is a vector format) so it can be resized without losing quality, if you're using text you should convert it to paths before submitting (in case the printing people don't have that font on their machine), and convert to CMYK color mode instead of the RGB but I think this can't be applied to SVG documents.

Thank you so much prkos.
All your advice much appreciated. God bless you all.

P.S.: FF contest fellows request an SVG file but they ask for it to be CMYK as well? Contradictory, isn't it?

The CMYK condition is required when printing from other formats, in my experience SVG isn't used much in printing industry because its rather new and more support needs to be done by vector software. (CMYK are the color pigments the printer ink comes in and that build the image on paper; cyan, magenta, yellow and black, while other color combination is used for monitor screen display - RGB; red, green, blue).

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2Reqs/#req-color As you can see CMYK is part of SVG 1.2 while Inkscape plans to support SVG 1.1 by the Inkscape version 1.0 (far away). Theres still a lot of work to be done in that area...

Zelus et Radix wrote:P.S.: FF contest fellows request an SVG file but they ask for it to be CMYK as well? Contradictory, isn't it?

I just went to the site. Do they specifically ask for it in CMYK? I didn't see that this was specified. I only seen that the requirement was SVG so I wouldn't worry about the colour mode.

Note that I think SVG does support other colour modes and Inkscape had introduced support for different colour modes in 0.46 - http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... uding_CMYK

DannyKing wrote:I think that the main barrier that Inkscape has is exporting to PDF. Now, I know it's come on in leaps and bounds in this area, but (and maybe it's just me?) when I export to PDF the results are not good. Things like blur and transparency are essential and I don't think they're supported. Maybe that's a limitation of PDF, I have no idea.

In a way, this is a limitation of both Inkscape and PDF. The PDF format doesn't have any support for describing blur and transparency on vector elements. Illustrator gets around this limitation by rasterising these areas which results in a PDF that is part vector and part raster. I'm not sure if there are plans for Inkscape to do the same, but if in doubt you can always use PDFCreator or Batik to convert your SVG into PDF - the result will be 100% raster but as long as you get the resolution right it's the safest way to ensure it prints exactly as you see it on the screen.

Thanks for the info microugly, much appreciated.

I've started a new topic where we can talk in detail about general printing issues - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=630