Re: Colour separation

[Ian Carr-de Avelon]

"Stewart C. Russell" <address@hidden> wrote:
>Ian Carr-de Avelon wrote:
>> 
>> How does everyone produce colour separation?
>
>What are you needing -- full four-colour separation, or just a spot
>colour?
Well, the full picture is. I'm in the middle of looking at Lout as a way to
print bills and it looks like a good way to go, and I'm thinking how it
may fit in to lots of other things for us (and best of all) cu$tomer$.
We are an ISP and work with a web server which allows definition of macros
in template files (www.roxen.com). Ie instead of 
<strong><font face="Times New Roman CE" size="5" color="#000000">
    INTERNET PROVIDER
    </font></strong></p>
I can put <sector>INTERNET PROVIDER</sector> and define somewhere else
what <sector> is. The main benefit of this is that there can be several
versions of <sector> which are used dependent on the browser, so someone
connecting with a WAP cell-phone does not get pages designed for a 21"
monitor. What I see is that I could easily parse such a file to Lout
@sector{ INTERNET PROVIDER } (although made to look possibly totally
different again from on any of the web browsers)
or the reverse, so I virtually have a system for one set of source files 
which produce a top rate web site, pdf files and a printed version. I
even know which client I could offer this to.

>
>The former is usally best left to your printer (though some places can
>be a bit clueless about it).
Perhapse if you are in the UK you do. Here raw text to printed paper
is always 3 companies. One to produce files with PageMaker, one to 
put that onto film and one to finally print it. No printer takes 
computer files and no film maker takes anything except files ready
separated. So the real question is: "how do I get Lout to make the files
which PageMaker" makes. 
I know that most publications have some pages seperated for full colour,
but most of the pages are black plus one colour; in the case of the client 
which would jump at this.

>Separations are tricky. There are so many variables, and so many
>printer-specific horrors,
Looking on the web site of the nearest company they provide drivers
for "PC" ie windows and Mac only. They say they have a "B2+ Scitex 4Press"
grep shows nothing about Scitex in the Ghostscript docs and www.scitex.com
has nothing about Linux. Hmm!

>If you are doing seps, don't forget the crop marks and alignment
>bullseyes. The latter are useful even if you're doing CtP; gives the
>printer something to check alignment with.
This is something I had not thought of/realised. So all the crosses and
the little blocks of colour at the side are put on by the DTP software
and not during the film making process. It sounds like in Lout you would
need to define a B2 page with all the A4 pages and the alignment marks as 
elements on that.
Yours
Ian