[plug] OpenOffice.org in a pre-press environment.

[James Devenish]

In message <1105864096.3341.16.camel at rasputin.localnet>
on Sun, Jan 16, 2005 at 04:28:16PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> That said, any half-decent RIP (or preflight tool) should be able to
> handle conversion from RGB "black" to true greyscale black without any
> issues.

Granted, RGB greyscales are no doubt easy to pick because every channel
has the same value.

> but it seems many printers don't have basic preflight tools for this
> sort of thing (or just don't want to deal with it).

While our graphic designer was away recently, I walked in on someone who
was clearly struggling with a pencil, an eraser, and lots of little
numbers in boxed squares. Apparently, she had supplied the printer with
spreads and been asked to resubmit. She was therefore trying to do
impose a 60-page job manually! <ROFL> Fortunately, the quick fix was to
split the spreads into individual pages and put her on the phone with
the printer who said something along the lines of "oh yeah, either you
can do it [imposition] or we can do it for you" <ROFL> Mind you, an hour
later I got a phone call because the cover artwork was RGB (!) with NO
BLEED (!) and needed to be converted into spot colour (!) for a gloss
cover (!). OH BOY THAT WAS A FUN AFTERNOON (!). But in the end it *was*
fun to see the final result and to know what we had done to achieve it.