The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.
I am actually producing PDF/X-4 print-ready stuff with Inkscape, ghostscript and Scribus. I even have TrimBoxes and proper CMYK.
But it involves many manual steps, especially overprinting for the K color channel does not work and I need to adjust every polygon and vectorized text manually.
I whish it would be possible all in one tool. I can afford the time, because it is only a hobby. If it would be professional the extra steps involved make it not good enough.
ghostcript can add a color profile, too. I use the regular ISO coated v2 (without the 300%). This is just a step to not do all things in Scribus by hand and make sure colors are not out of gamut.
I don’t now the command line from the top of my head. Just ping me again, so when I am on my computer I can send the complete ghostscript cli line that currently works for me.
The final profile is set up by Scribus, where I have set it to the ISO coated with 300%. Ideally I would like to have less steps in the chain, so that a change in the Inkscape-source involves less manually steps. One can dream of it. (:
I don’t now which of ProcessColorModel or ColorConversionStrategy is the important one. I kept both and did not bother to try to omit one of them. -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress makes sure that embedded bitmaps are in 300dpi and I think -f prevents Ghostscript staying in interactive mode after all pages have been finished.
Awh fuck. I bought a lifetime thing for the whole Affinity studio like two years ago when it was on sale. Is there a decent alternative to Affinity? I would rather not go back to GIMP for images, just cos the UI/UX isn’t so smooth!
The current version of Affinity is great and will continue to work forever—there’s no need to switch to an alternative if you’re already using it. I just don’t have much hope for its future development.
The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.
A subscription web service
If we all spent that money on gimp, scribus and inkscape, they would be so much better in just 2 years.
I am actually producing PDF/X-4 print-ready stuff with Inkscape, ghostscript and Scribus. I even have TrimBoxes and proper CMYK.
But it involves many manual steps, especially overprinting for the K color channel does not work and I need to adjust every polygon and vectorized text manually.
I whish it would be possible all in one tool. I can afford the time, because it is only a hobby. If it would be professional the extra steps involved make it not good enough.
I use Ghostscript for postprocessing the PDF files. What do yo I use to add a color profile for example?
ghostcript can add a color profile, too. I use the regular ISO coated v2 (without the 300%). This is just a step to not do all things in Scribus by hand and make sure colors are not out of gamut.
I don’t now the command line from the top of my head. Just ping me again, so when I am on my computer I can send the complete ghostscript cli line that currently works for me.
The final profile is set up by Scribus, where I have set it to the ISO coated with 300%. Ideally I would like to have less steps in the chain, so that a change in the Inkscape-source involves less manually steps. One can dream of it. (:
Here I am again.
I’ve been fantasizing of making a simple GS GUI.
Finally I found the time to write down, how I use Ghostscript:
gs \ -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -o /output/gs_file.pdf \ -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \ -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK \ -sDefaultCMYKProfile=/path/to/ISOcoated_v2_eci.icc \ -sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK \ source/file.pdf \ -fI don’t now which of
ProcessColorModelorColorConversionStrategyis the important one. I kept both and did not bother to try to omit one of them.-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepressmakes sure that embedded bitmaps are in 300dpi and I think-fprevents Ghostscript staying in interactive mode after all pages have been finished.Thanks a lot, I will try this !
Agree.
Oh no, when did they get bought by those ghouls?
Just over a year ago.
Awh fuck. I bought a lifetime thing for the whole Affinity studio like two years ago when it was on sale. Is there a decent alternative to Affinity? I would rather not go back to GIMP for images, just cos the UI/UX isn’t so smooth!
The current version of Affinity is great and will continue to work forever—there’s no need to switch to an alternative if you’re already using it. I just don’t have much hope for its future development.
One of their pledges when they were bought was to always have a standalone product to buy so people don’t have to do subscriptions.
That’s good of them. We’ll see what their Canva overlords think of those nice intentions 🫡