Print Color Separations

[Bug Importer]

Along with spot colors Inkscape should be able to
handle printing duties by itself without the help of a
third party software. The ability to print color
separations (sport and process) will make Inkscape a
very attractive alternative to the mainstream players
(Freehand, CorelDraw, etc). I'm a screenprinter and I
truly believe that without this features its aceptance
as a profesional tool would be limited. Don't
misunderstand me: Inkscape is a very capable piece of
software but not yet a tool that we can fully use for
our day to day work. I think is quite ready but it
needs a little work in the output part of the software
and with output I mean the aforementioned Color
Separations both process (CMYK) and Spot Colors.

[Ryan Lerch (ryanlerch)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this feature request and helping to make Inkscape better. You requested this feature a long while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering; is this still on your wishlist? Can you try with latest Inkscape release and see if recent improvements have obsoleted your request? Thanks in advance.

[Alexandre Prokoudine (alexandre-prokoudine)]

Inkscape doesn't create color separations yet and its CMYK related features as of 0.46 are pretty rudimentary.

[isoma (isoma)]

I'd like to use Inkscape to edit images for print, so I'd like to be able to export to a CMYK document. Instead I've been using a separate rasteriser to produce an sRGB bitmap, then converting that to CMYK. This means losing all the resolution independence of the vector format.

To help with printing Inkscape should be able to output print colours: CMYK bitmaps, CMYK PDF documents, or even export to SVG Print. This doesn't depend on using CMYK (or spot) colours in the SVG document itself, but that is bound to help.

[BenMcLean (mclean-ben)]

Here is a plugin that is meant to solve this problem: http://www.colivre.coop.br/Aurium/InkscapeCMYKSeparator

[Joshua Blocher (verbalshadow)]

There is a extension that makes separations now http://www.colivre.coop.br/Aurium/InkscapeCMYKSeparator

[BenMcLean (mclean-ben)]

Whoops I ran into this bug http://www.nabble.com/Re:-Extension-Create-Separation-CYMK-(Valessio-S-Brito)-td19419606.html

[BenMcLean (mclean-ben)]

How do we get InkScape to automatically print colors on seperate pages as CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator can?

[BenMcLean (mclean-ben)]

With help from people on IRC in #inkscape and #perl, I've come up with a version of this plugin that works in Windows, based on the original plugin from http://www.colivre.coop.br/Aurium/InkscapeCMYKSeparator

You need to put "cmyk-separator.inx" and "cmyk-separator.pl" in \share\extensions\

You need to install Perl (under Windows, use ActivePerl at http://www.activestate.com/Products/activeperl/index.mhtml ) and make sure it gets into your system path.

Known bugs in this plugin:
1. It does not work under stable Inkscape 0.46. My test was with the September 6th build of Inkscape 0.46-devel
1. The (or at least some of the) document properties (my test was a Letter sized paper) don't seem to carry over into the newly created SVGs.
2. Perl.exe doesn't exit until the inkscape instances it opens with the seperations all exit.

The plugin is attached to this message.

[BenMcLean (mclean-ben)]

Things I'd like to do with this plugin:

1. Fix the bugs listed in my previous message
2. Completely rewrite it in Python so it can be included with Inkscape by default.

[BenMcLean (mclean-ben)]

See my comments. The plugin I got help to write has some rather serious bugs but could be the basis for getting what we want done at least temporarily without a major overhaul of inkscape's CMYK support

[BenMcLean (mclean-ben)]

Also I just discovered bug #3. I mispelled "Separator" lol

[grey tomorrow (gtomorrow)]

Hi - thanks for reporting this bug, I've manually migrated it to Inkscape's new bug tracker on GitLab, and closed it here.

Please feel free to file new bugs about the issues you're seeing at
https://inkscape.org/report .

Moved to: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/issues/2480
Closed by: https://gitlab.com/greytomorrow