Linux for Designers

John Cruz posted some interesting news about CMYK profiles in Inkscape. It seems the upcoming Inkscape 0.47 would be very interesting for prepress cases too:
* Add a basic UI for linking to ICC profiles
* Integrate ICC profile support into the existing color selectors, incl. gamut warning.
* Improved style and/or CSS support to manage paint types, palettes, etc.
* Basic support for "registration" color/style.
* Coordinate with Cairo team on extending API beyond RGB
* CMYK PDF export

That sounds great so after that it isn't longer necessary exporting Bitmaps and using Gimp to create CMYK PDF documents.

Update
Some more information and mockups at the Inkscape Brazil Wiki (in portuguese).

I updated my CMYK Tiff 2 PDF for Gimp plugin besides minor fixes i added new features like:
* Exporting two images as on PDF
* Start Acrobat or Evince after export
* Delete CMYK TIff images after PDF creation

For myself it sounds like feature complete but i'm interested in your feedback too.

» Read more...

To complete my workflow using Seperate+ that generates CMYK Tiff images inside of Gimp i wrote a small Python plugin for Gimp that allows you to convert the saved CMYK Tiff image into a PDF for prepress.

Read more...

With some minor changes Seperate+ 0.5.2 is available:
* enabled dragging ICC profile onto profile selection buttons
* profile selection button : (Mac OS X only)fix crashing when checking primary language
* updated Japanese localization messages
* added Polish (from Zbigniew Małach) and Korean (from Dust) localization messages
If you looking for a Ubuntu Deb package you can download my 0.5.1 binary.

Once i reported about the further development of the Seperate plugin: Seperate+, a nice addon to export Gimp images into the CMYK color space. After my Ubuntu Graphic Workshop i renembered the plugin (many people asked about Gimp & CMYK) and i revisited the site again: Taa-Taa Seperate+ 0.5.1 is available but not longer as a Linux binary .
So i tried to compile it and for the first time i did it successful. Then go step by step of this Deb-Making-List (thanks to Simpsons-Fan) and created a Deb Archive of it:
gimp-seperate+-0.5.1-i386.deb
The plugin can be found at the menu of the image windows: "Image > Seperate".
You can get nice CMYK color profiles by installing the Ubuntu package "icc-profiles" and download color profiles of Adobe (copy them into ~/color/icc).

How its works:
* Open your RGB image in Gimp via "File > Open"
* Start Seperate+ "<Image Window> > Image > Seperate > Seperate"
* Setup the profiles, may as source "Adobe 1998" and as destination profile "Euroscala V2"
* Press OK, an image with 4 layers is created
* Each layer represents a color channel of CMYK
* Now save the image as CMYK Tiff at "<Image Window> > Image > Seperate > Save..."

Update:
Check out my Sepearte+ addon "CMYK Tiff 2 PDF for Gimp" to and read the post about color profiles too. The Seperate+ plugin is bundled with Ubuntu 8.10 and higher, just install the package "gnome-plugin-registry".

Yoshinori Yamakawa has written a improved version of the Seperate plugin called Speperate+.
Well done! Here is a comparsion: Seperate, Sepearet+ and Photoshop 7:



UPDATE:
Get a short Howto and a Deb archive for Ubuntu here.