Hi,

John Culleton writes:

OK I download freefonts and sharefonts. I install them per the README (two xset commands per each set.) They are available to Gimp.
I reboot for some reason.
The fonts are no longer available to Gimp.

I can put a routine in /etc/rc.d to repeat the xset commands after every reboot but it seems to me there must be a more elegant way.

Why not add the new font paths to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 instead of using xset?

Sven

Hi,

John Culleton writes:

Right as rain. That is a permanent fix. Which raises the next question: why not alter the READMEs to offer this approach instead of the xset business?

Probably because it works completely different in 1.3 and we don't put anymore effort into 1.2 despite some casual bug-fixing. And then it's not really the job of GIMP's README to explain the pitfalls of X11 font configuration. There are plenty of HOWTOs out there that do a much better job at this.

Sven

Hi,

John Culleton writes:

I have stayed with 1.2.5 because (a) it works and (b) 1.3 doesn't offer any impovement in the cmyk area, which is my big need.

The 1.3 versions do at least provide the framework that is needed for doing color selection in CMYK as a pluggable module. Dunno if that would help you though.

Can you give me some idea on what is different in the 1.3 font handling area? Are the freefonts and sharefonts still included?

They have never been included but GIMP will continue to be able to use them. GIMP-1.3 only does a much better job at rendering them. I am not going to explain 1.3 font handling in detail, but basically it uses fontconfig to manage fonts, pango for layouting and freetype2 to render the glyphs.

Sven

Hi,

John Culleton writes:

As you know most prepress folks want all color images in CMYK form. So an ablilty to save in CMYK instead of RGB would be what I need. I suppose one could use ImageMagick instead but I haven't tried that.

You are only making things worse if you convert from RGB to CMYK without detailed knowledge of the printer, the inks and the paper that will be used. This is the reason why GIMP doesn't support CMYK yet. If it was only about doing the RGB->CMYK conversion using the naive and uncalibrated formula, that would be a five-minute hack that we would have long done. You should really let the printer do the conversion for you. Only the printer knows all the necessary details. And only if they gave you the color profiles for the printer, inks and paper, you could do a reasonable conversion using an appropriate tool.

Sven

On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 10:16:24AM -0400, John Culleton wrote: | When one saves from Gimp to PNM I assume that is also an RGB format. | There is a program pnmtotiffcmyk which I have been using. Unfortunately | my preferred typesetting engine, pdftex, now disallows TIFF graphics because | of the many variations of TIFF being produced. They allow JPEG, PNM and | PDF formats for included images.

Don't you think the problem lies with your preferred typesetting engine pdftex not allowing CMYK image formats instead?

You could try tiff2ps on the generated CMYK TIFF and use the resulting PostScript file with TeX. You can convert that PostScript file to PDF with ps2pdf for use with pdftex.

Mukund

Hi,

John Culleton writes:

Unless one is concerned with flesh tones the exact shades are not all that critical. So I would welcome Sven's "five minute hack." Could it be provided as a plugin or something, with a warning label?

We'd just have to add the simple RGB to CMYK conversion functions to libgimpcolor and change a couple of file plug-ins to do the conversion when saving the image. If there really is use for this functionality, I will look into adding it.

Sven

On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 04:36:39PM +0200, Sven Neumann wrote:

You are only making things worse if you convert from RGB to CMYK

Not really... people I talked to said they can perfectly handle that (adjusting colours later in a layout program for example, or simply addign a matching colour profile).

On the other hand, many layout programs simply treat files as CMYK, even if they are RGB, which is a lot worse since it cannot be fixed easily.

Also, no information is being destroyed, since you had no colour profile in RGB, the simple formula is a good as any other.

would have long done. You should really let the printer do the conversion for you. Only the printer knows all the necessary details.

Unfortunately, the printer often can't or won't do that, since the printer wants CMYK no matter what.

Hi,

just for your information, the CVS version does include the RGBCMYK conversions now and it offers a simple CMYK color selector. I have not yet started on adding support for saving CMYK data but at least I started reading the TIFF spec. If anyone wants to help to add support for saving CMYK, that would be very much appreciated.

Sven

Hi,

John Culleton writes:

So much for the status report. Now here is my question. The release notes mention a "trivial" RGB to CMYK conversion function. However I could not find the function on the menus. If it is a plug in then I didn't get it. This as everyone knows by now a critical issue for the book cover application. Printers expect CMYK and will be unhappy (or charge extra) if they get RGB instead.

The conversion functions are there but 1.3.17 uses it for the CMYK color selector only. Hopefully we can add CMYK support to at least one or two file plug-ins before 2.0 is released.

Sven