Linux for Designers

Seperate+ for Gimp, a plugin that sepeartes color channels to layers and allows you to attach color profiles, is now available as version 0.5.5. This release adds again interesting color features:

* separate
  - Change Embedded profile priority configuration in Separate and Proof functions to the default
  - Support file export of JPEG and Photoshop PSD formats
  - Allow to specify whether the file is compressed or not when the file is exported
  - Allow to designate a profile of the destination color space as null
    when a devicelink profile is used in Separate dialog
  - Fix a rendering bug when color separation under the condition that Preserve pure black
    is enabled for layers containing alpha channel
  - Fix crash when an image whose height is less than 64 pixels is exported in TIFF format
* IccButton
  - Change priorities of locations from which profiles are searched (Windows, Mac OS X)
  - Enable to acquire the path of the system profile folder using API of ICM (Windows)
  - Fix a bug which characters contained a path of a selected profile make a record of
    history occasionally unsuccessful
* Update message catalogs in Japanese and Russian

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.

The 4th and hopefully last prerelease of Inkscape 0.47 is out. This prerelease is focused on stable live path effects.
So test it and send the developers your feedback. The bad news is that there is no prerelease4 package for Ubuntu yet:
https://launchpad.net/~inkscape-nightly/+ppa-packages
https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.testers/+archive/ppa

The 2nd prerelease of Inkscape is available, please test and report any issues you run into.
Check out the roadmap and my older posts about the devlopment of Inkscape 0.47 (here, here and here) to explore the new features.
If you are using Ubuntu Linux you will find the older prerelease 0 at the Inkscape PPA.

Since May 15 the Inkscape 0.47 development is in feature freeze and in some days the Hard freeze follows. In mid of June the vector graphics software Inkscape 0.47 will be available. For more details about the 0.47 release check out the roadmap and my older posts about Inkscape:
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/2008/05/25/inkscape-0-47-space-optimization
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/2008/07/16/inkscape-0-47-path-effects
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/show.dml/1993194

Of course this upcoming release needs a new About screen. So the typical Inkscape About Screen Contest is announced.

After using my CMYK Tiff 2 PDF for Gimp in real life by creating the prepress PDF of the german Ubuntu flyer and the chance to get it bundled in the Debian package "gimp-plugin-registry" i updated it again and fixed some bugs:
* added license information about GPLV2
* now compression modi "Zip" and "JPEG 95%" are working
* a creator sign "GIMP CMYK Tiff 2 PDF" in the meta informations of the PDF document will be added

» Read more...

Here is a short summery of what is going on at the Inkscape project:
* GSoC student Jasper van der Gronde started working on support for OpenMP which brings multi processor support to Inkscape
* A spray tool is planed to be integrated based on some GSOC work from 2008
* students are wanted for GSOC 2009 working on new Inkscape features

If you like to get detailed informations how to use Scribus for layouts and prepress then you can now preorder The Official Scribus 1.3 Manual at Fleskbook.
A sample chapter can be found at the Scribus website.

Color profiles are usefull for prepress, image and video editing. Besides the package "icc-proflies" (contains ECI-RGB.V1.0.icc, ISOcoated.icc, ISOuncoated.icc, ISOuncoatedyellowish.icc, ISOwebcoated.icc, LStar-RGB.icc, PhotoGamutRGB_avg6c.icc, Fogra27L.icm, sRGB.icm) that ships with Ubuntu there are other free and professional color profile available:

Adobe
http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/iccprofiles/win/AdobeICCProfiles_end-user.zip
http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/iccprofiles/win/AdobeICCProfilesCS4Win_end-user.zip

ECI European Color Initiative
http://www.eci.org/doku.php?id=en:downloads

ICC profiles are a standard of color management. All of them are platform independent and can be used with Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape and F-Spot & Co. To make the profiles available system wide (including Windows applications running on Wine) copy the downloadad profiles to

~/.color/icc

Myself prefer the Euroscale V2 profile for print and the Adobe 1998 profile for image editing.

Envince and a lot of other PDF viewers are great for the daily usage. But working with PDF documents for prepress the best at all is always the Adobe PDF Reader. Due some security issues Adobe updated it now to version 8.1.3.
The Adobe Reader is available in various languages as a Deb and RPM archive too, so its easy for you to install it. You can get it via the Medibuntu Repository too.

Seperate+ for Gimp, a plugin that sepeartes color channels to layers and allows you to attach color profiles, is now available as version 0.5.3. This release adds a lot of interesting color device features:

* profile selection button : shows profile class icon
  - Digital camera : input device class
  - LCD monitor : display device class
  - Desktop printer : output device class(RGB)
  - Color LBP/copier : output device class(CMYK)
* profile selection button : minor fixes
It seems i have to update my Ubuntu Deb package of 0.5.1 soon Check out the new screenshot gallery at the bottom of the Seperate+ page too!