On Wednesday 19 June 2002 05:23 pm, Michael J. Hammel wrote:

Thus spoke John Culleton

Now, I want to make a book cover, four color. I know that cmyk is handled only marginally in Gimp. I don't have and don't particularly want to have Adobe Distiller (the Unix price is ridiculous.) So what is the best strategy for me to follow, assuming that my printer will need to pick up the prepress preparation burden at some point? Should I attempt to prepare separations ? Should I convert my Gimp-made cover to pdf via Ghostscript?

Let your printer do the hardwork. You do the easy stuff - art design. Save in uncompressed TIFF and take to your printer. They can load it into Photoshop and do the color separation for you. This is what I've done for various magazines, books, CD covers and brochures.

And has anyone actually done a book cover in four colors using Gimp?

Yes. I did the cover of my first book using the GIMP, version 1.0 actually. The issue you'll have to deal with is how out-of-gamut the color might end up. In my cases, I wasn't too concerned if the colors were a little off, so long as they weren't waaaaay off. I had little trouble in these cases.

Very good! Now, when you laid out your tiff, of course you had an allowance for the thickeness of the spine, based on the printer's ppi. Did you also leave an allowance for the thickness of the cover itself? And did you add anything to the nominal width & height for trim?

In other words, for 5.5 x 8.5, with a ppi of 500 and 250 pages, is the width of the tiff exactly 11.5 inches or a little more? Is the height 8.5 or a little more?

Thanks so much for your help.

John Culleton

___

Hi there.

Firstly, my thanks to those who passed on helpful information about the text tool. I am much less in a puzzlement now :-)

My current want/need is to print an image from the command line. I have quite a few images that need to be printed, and printing them separately and interactively takes a looong time.

I've been trying "gimp -s -b print" followed by any number of variations on the theme of the apparent arguments as mentioned in pluginrc, but all I get is "execution failed". The "print" itself seems to be ok, because I always get one "execution successful" first.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards, K.

-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (kauer@biplane.com.au) +41-43-2660706 (h) http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/ +41- 1-6327531 (w)

Very good! Now, when you laid out your tiff, of course you had an allowance for the thickeness of the spine, based on the printer's ppi. Did you also leave an allowance for the thickness of the cover itself? And did you add anything to the nominal width & height for trim?

In other words, for 5.5 x 8.5, with a ppi of 500 and 250 pages, is the width of the tiff exactly 11.5 inches or a little more? Is the height 8.5 or a little more?

You should allow 9 points (about 1/8") for any edge that bleeds. So, for a 5.5x8.5 book, where all sides bleed, the final image size would be:

(11.75 + spine width + flap width) x 8.75

--Joel