[plug] GIMP/Pshop

[Craig Ringer]

Hi folks

I've noticed something interesting over the last few weeks. The POST has
been getting even more mangled images (incomplete/truncated, corrupt, or
nonstandard than usual. Photoshop chokes on and totally refuses to
display most of these images, leading to great frustration as we
approach deadline.

Interestingly, I'm usually able to open them using the GIMP, and if the
image isn't completely trashed I can often recover it for use in the
paper. The most common case, image truncation, is almost always a snap -
crop it and save it as a valid TIFF. The GIMP seems more able to deal
with corrupt images, too, such as CMYK TIFFs tagged internally as RGB by
retarded image editors, or images with small blocks of garbage in them. 

So ... just as people who still need MS Office a useful tool for data
recovery, I'm finding the GIMP a valuable companion to Photoshop. This
week we were able to print several images only because the GIMP was able
to handle a partial read of the images in question off a badly scratched
CD (thanks, dd!) just before print time. 

I'm doing a very similar thing with GhostScript - while it doesn't
currently work well enough for us to use it in place of Distiller
(output files too large, dodgy embedded font support), it's been a
lifesaver more than once as the last page of the paper fails to distill
10 minutes before it's due at the printer. A quick 
'ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress' and all is usually well, because gs
seems able to handle more complex / convoluted documents than Distiller.
If they both barf, we know there's probably a bad font or bad EPS in the
source document - but 90% of the time, gs "just works". 

We have had one unfortunate accident where gs produced a pdf that looked
fine in Acrobat, but had some elements misplaced when run through the
printers' RIP. The alternative would've been late fees, so I think we
got off ok. Trust me - you _never_ want to experience late fees at a
printing house.

I find this trend interesting - OSS apps that while they may not quite
do everything you need, can be used as an incredibly handy helper
alongside commercial apps because of their tendency to handle document
formats in more robust ways. 

Now if only the GIMP had littleCMS (www.littlecms.com) integrated, and
full CMYK support, I'd be able to think about testing it in production.
I know about the gimp CMYK plugin - it's not good enough for serious
CMYK work. You need support for output device _and_ display profiles,
out-of-gamut warnings when working in RGB for CMYK output, etc.

I'm beginning to wonder if Scribus will be usable as a Quark replacement
before GIMP can be used in print prepress. Still, I'm not complaining -
it's a darn handy app just as it is.

Craig Ringer