Inkscape

Color safety when Exporting to PDF

Asked by efri

When I save my work as a PDF file and go to the printer shop , I get a result that is close to the original but still quite different.
As I spent a lot of time selecting colors, this is deceptive.
How could I improve the way I'm saving the file? What are the best way to fill in the small questionnaire when saving ?
Thank you all

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Hachmann
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Best Hachmann (marenhachmann) said : 		#1

Hi efri,

to get a color-proof printout, you would need the following:

- a calibrated monitor (you need a monitor calibration tool (a colorimeter) and the corresponding software on your computer for this)
- the color profile of the printing device in the print shop (a file describing the colors that printer will be able to print)
- depending on the printer's color profile, you may need to use another software in between which can create pdf files in CMYK color space (usually needed for printing) from your svg files (a DTP (desktop publishing) software, like scribus (scribus.net)).

This is called color-managed workflow, you will maybe need to do a web search for the specific details if you would really like to go into this.

Inkscape does support a few steps of this workflow, but not all of them, specifically, even if you create your file in CMYK colorspace in Inkscape, this will be lost on pdf export.

Kind regards,
 Maren

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efri (efrinumeric) said : 		#2

Thank you for answering so fastly. At least I discovered that I've still a lot to learn.
I'll try to follow your recommendation.
Thanks again,
Efri-numeric