Yesterday I went to a printer to get a proof for a two-sided brochure. I'd like to post my experience to help others, and to discuss issues I ran into.

I produced both sides of the brochure in Inkscape 0.47 on Windows XP. My PC is a few years old. About 1.7 GHz with about a meg of memory I think. Both images have some tiled clones - about 150 clones of a rectangle on one side, and of a cirlce on the other. There are a few images embedded in each. Each has three layers. There are a few gradients. Overall, the images are of moderate complexity. The SVG files are under 500K each.

As the printer suggested, I made the page size include the bleed margin, so it was 8 3/4 by 11 1/4 inches. I'm not sure if it is only an Inkscape issue, or part of the PDF definition, but you can't put crop marks outside of the page boundary in Inkscape and have them show up in Adobe Reader. At least I haven't found a way to do that. Would be nice.

I saved the files as two separate PDF files to bring to the printer. One file was almost 3M, and the other almost 5M. When I opened them up on my PC, it took about 30 seconds to see all the graphic elements appear. The printer could see all elements, but when printing a proof on a big Xerox digital printer, some of the images (JPG) that are in the brochure did not show up. Same for a rectangle, and the text that was on it. Yikes.

The printer used some tool (Adobe soemething, I'm guessing) to conver the PDF to a 300 dpi graphic file, and then printed that. It printed OK, but since I'd used 600 dpi to produce the PDF, it wasn't quite as crisp.

The other issue, and probably nothing to do with Inkscape, was the color printed. The background of the brochure is a blue gradient (fading to a whitish blue in places). When I print at home on an old HP inkjet, it is still blue, but a bit dark. When printed at the printer, it appears more violet/purple. Is this just a "different printer" issue or more of a RGB vs. CMYK issue?

Any overall comments or suggestions are welcome!

I never had any luck with taking pdf to printers, I always ended up using GIMP to export to CMYK tiff.

I think 300 dpi is enough for a nice print, maybe it was the conversion that "ruined" it a bit.

Did you embed the jpg images? Were objects that didn't show up blurred or with other filters?

The color offset is probably a result of both different printers and CMYK issue, but probably much more the CMYK issue.

prkos wrote:I never had any luck with taking pdf to printers, I always ended up using GIMP to export to CMYK tiff.

I think 300 dpi is enough for a nice print, maybe it was the conversion that "ruined" it a bit.

Did you embed the jpg images? Were objects that didn't show up blurred or with other filters?

The color offset is probably a result of both different printers and CMYK issue, but probably much more the CMYK issue.

Thanks for the reply. I have a little small text (most is large), and that's what I was looking at to check the
300 vs. 600 comparison.

I probably didn't embed the images. But if they made it to the PDF, does it matter?

You have to download an extension to get CMYK tiff's from GIMP, right? Would love to get a pointer
to step by step instructions for doing that (download and conversion).

No, embedding shouldn't matter in pdf, don't know why I said that lol

On linux I think I just found it in the repository and installed from there. If you're not on linux download separate+ plugin for GIMP and it should probably go into plugins directory for GIMP, where ever it is on your system.

When you open your large dpi file in GIMP go to Image > Separate > Separate. It will be opened in a new image window, there go to Image > Separate > Save.

You can create a Proof to see if the colors are ok, you can use this to adjust some colors if needed, but still this isn't full proof.

Thanks! Will try that extension soon.

I just realized that for a digital printer, it may not be a benefit to separate to CMYK. Just called the printer. It is a CMYK printer, but they said if I bring a TIFF file, it should not be color separated.

Wow. The TIFF files are 135M!

Yup they can be huge. Not sure about the CMYK thing, maybe they will convert it, or they have a printer that does it automatically. Let us know how it went!

I went back yesterday with 5 different versions of the files: 2 PDF's, 2 PNG's, and 1 TIFF. The 2's were at 300 and 600 dpi. The printer was able to convert the 600 dpi PDF's to a different PDF version (PDF 1 or PDF X?), and those printed fine.

To get the colors the way I wanted, I had to change the hue from 170 to 152, so it came out blue, not purple. On my laptop, 170 looks real blue, and also on my inkjet printer. The printer printed a color wheel chart I designed so I have that as a handy reference now.

Thanks again!