 Okay, we might get started again. Our next talk is, and our final talk, is Print the Final Frontier. Our speaker is a core inkscape developer, yeah, whatever, and has been working in print and media for several decades. Could you please put your hands together for John Cruz? Well, thank you very much. Now my talk this time is going to be about print, real print, getting something physical. So usually we're talking, going to be talking here about stuff more than just the casual hook your $40 inkjet printer up to your laptop and go. But not scaling from one step above there on, not necessarily way off at the top. So what we're going to discover is that I really believe this is the, oh, no, no, no, no. There we go. This is the year of Linux in the print shop. There's been a lot going on, a lot moving and especially why I called this the final frontier is because being able to be used the whole open source software stack from Linux all the way up, being able to be used in professional graphic design houses is finally just about there. It's taken quite a while to get it all the way, mainly because people want to make sure they get it right. This is one of those things where it's easy to get something that's almost there, but it's hard to get it right. So what are we going to be going over? Probably hopefully end up with the points that you understand where the areas are that Linux has to move into, Linux and open source and applications and drivers and whatever else you have in there. To learn what sort of issues are preventing acceptance by professionals. And that means everybody who says, oh, Linux is a toy. We can't use it in my business. You need to maybe hopefully get some understanding of the objective and subjective problems blocking Linux adoption in this area and to consider area where different contributions might be made, which finally might here we might get some good momentum coming out of this. Although I will admit if anyone attended Rusty's welcome talk, you have to remember do not start more than one new project. I'll grant you that. So for the overview. I'm going to try to give you a quick summary of print professionals, some of the needs, the problem areas as I mentioned. Address the commonly heard statement, who here has ever heard I need CMYK? How many of you have said it? Okay, some of those a third have seen it. Okay, and that how I'm seeing that Linux does serve the masses, but, and we're going to come back on to that. So who might be considered print professionals right now? I'd say photographers. Anyone who produces beautiful art and there are several here, I know, who either is heavy duty, hardcore hobbyists or semi-professionals or the occasional freelancer do some really amazing work. Graphic designers. Anyone in here happen to be a graphic designer by practice or profession or dabbling? Yes, we have at least some in here. That's good. Publishers. Publishers could go all the way from your standard big house that puts out dozens of books a quarter to just, you know, your little corner leaflet things, you know, you can scale that down a little. Artist. Anyone here an artist? Nothing, nothing, maybe slightly one. Yeah, they're not here at this conference. That's where we actually have a lot of input at the Libre Graphics meetings, which is something else to look up, where they tried to intentionally bring together artists and developers and creative people and everyone all together to mix it up, because otherwise you get this. How many are in this room? None? Okay. Now, of these people, the professionals, which operating system do they use? Mac. Almost hands down. Any of the graphic designers that don't want to be made fun of by other graphic designers? Not necessarily using professional enough, but they'll be using Macs. Some on Windows and a few high-end, you get some high-end, especially publishers and other really technically advanced type people using Unix or Hadbin, those are getting a clip slightly, but not Linux, especially, and not some of the applications. So just to throw out real quick, we have some different professionals with different types of needs. Fine art reproduction, trying to create lithos or prints for a gallery. Photographs of gallery art, exhibited artwork. That's an extremely different verified kind of area all unto itself. General photography. You have a lot of professionals who do photography, wedding photography, is in our area one of the big industries. You get individuals who go out on the weekend, make their living, shooting other people's weddings and giving the people some nice prints and books at the end that, since it's a wedding, are intended to last quite a while. And you do not want those looking cheap or poor or you don't stay in the business. And then you have large offset print runs, which here I might say, ah, here's a very nice poster, but this is not really what I'm talking about. This is more like a giant inkjet printer, just digitally dump this out. You get books, fine art, coffee table books, especially. Those will have very nice production quality. So when you're producing this poster versus some other posters even, you might encounter completely different technical needs. And here is one area that I come up with constantly, even a few times today. Whereas people in one area think that applies to the other. Hollywood and television, film, production, I point out, because those are the people who, at the one extreme, even say there is no need whatsoever for any color management at all. That's because among other things in the US, especially television is so well defined, you know exactly what each numeric level is supposed to be defined by precise engineering and all your displays are calibrated and you pull up the oscilloscopes and everything and measure your signals, you get everything controlled, at least in third. So they don't realize what they need. And so they just strip everything to this one standard, but they forget everybody else is not them. And so we have some of that issue coming around. Now, problem areas. Who is familiar with color management in general? One, two, quarter, maybe a third. So on other operating systems in Linux, although yes, this is running Linux now, so don't lynch me when I'm not looking. It's Macintosh, MacOS Windows, it's handled by the operating system. Linux, it's not. At least yet. And there are certain things that it's not expected to. If you need something, you put that something on there. You don't get one big can that does everything for everybody. You get what you need, which is good and bad, but here it just means we have to explicitly address it. And it is covered in specifications such as post script and PDF. And all the high end print is now pretty much moving to specialized targettings of PDF. So if you see someone who's in the book industry who's making a 400 page book with color plates and everything else, chances are PDF is going to be going out there at some point, but professional PDF. Not the PDF you get out of Inkscape right now. And then when we're going to problem areas, when you go to four color or offset press, this printer may have been printed by kind of a different process for this poster here. But when you get separate plates for cyan, magenta, yellow and black or six color now, that's very common. Spot inks. So if you're using Pantone colors or resin paints or some of the other, I think, HKS, perhaps anyway, in Europe, you have other standards too. And then you have the non-trivial print work. So this has kind of been expressed before. For 80% of the people, they don't need any of this. So why bother? Well, it's for the other 20% of the people you do need to know what trapping true black knock up. Who knows what these terms refer to? One, two people. Yeah, that's the problem. That's why you're here. So let's look at probably the biggest issue that comes up over and over and over. When you hear people say, I need CMYK. You need, so why aren't you using Linux? Because I need CMYK. I'm going to stay on Windows. Because I need CMYK. I'm going to stay with the proprietary vendor software. Well, do they? My usual answer is no, you don't. You think you need it, but you don't. And this holds true for large numbers of users out there. So you, in fact, whereas in the back, in the dark ages of printing and everything else, you had to be able to tweak the separations to be able to get a decent print of your photograph out. If you're working in color images, though, in general, especially photographs, because that used to be the area where you wanted it to be just right, so you had to do. But now photographers can get better results by sticking to RGB. Adobe, even in Impress and their professional print work, mentioned late binding or late conversion. So keep it in RGB until the very last moment before you prep your file to send off to the printer to run on a specific, to the print house, to run on a specific printer. So that's for a large majority, I believe. You don't need it. But the problem is that doesn't hold true for everyone. And especially the professionals. Now, is Linux just a Tory operating system? Well, when it comes to the enterprise business needs server, no. When it comes to the graphics, arts, creative side, yes, it really kind of still is, at least for maybe, hopefully only a few more months. But a lot of this of the I need, I need are just old habits that are outdated and actually cause, they got in the habits because they needed to do this. But nowadays, those habits are getting in the way of them achieving what they really want. So, okay, for some of the people, maybe you do need it. So when you talk to someone, if this comes up, you have to feel them out, find out why, okay, why do you need, how in your workflow does, do you require it? Because there's a chance they need it. But of course, most likely is they don't. But what we, especially here at LinuxConf, you have everybody here who cares about getting it right. You don't want to say, oh, leave the professional market to somebody else. We don't care. We're good enough. I don't think that's gonna fly. So at the moment, like I said, that 80% of the market, maybe, just, you know, just signing a rough 80-20 rule, nothing actual concrete or data-wise there. RGB printing close enough or even eyeballing. You're not, your monitor isn't even calibrated. Why should you worry about anything else? Or how can you? You can't. Don't worry. It's good enough for them. So that's leaving the high-end professionals to the proprietary vendors expensive. So you're talking creative suite where I could go to, for the price of Adobe Creative Suite, I could go down to the corner in California and buy a decent used car. That just doesn't seem quite right to me. And movie studios are also another one. They have other reasons, too, but they often have high-end proprietary stacks of all the stuff they do that they don't want anyone else to be able to do. And that's where, you know, open source can come in and take the wind out of their sails there. It's already worked on the operating system and the final system and storage. So we can finish releasing their grip a little there, too. But where it's really failing is the independent artists who can't afford creative suite unless they steal it. And then suddenly, technically, at some point, you might be raided by the BSA and then you're gone. You're done. Or a small business. Small businesses already have a tough enough time. They can't afford all these extra proprietary lock-in taxes. And freedom advocates. How many people got hassled even in, you know, kindly, brotherly ingest about running macOS here at this conference? Well, my response was, sure, I run Linux when I can, but I cannot always run it. Fix it so I can't. So you don't, you don't care about graphics. You don't care about art. You don't care about anything else, but you care about freedom. You care about being open. Fix it. So that finishes overview. And now we're into the part where the pain comes in. So where is the pain? Applications, most don't do what people need it to do. To get you the technical control, to get the full power, they're just not there. Libraries, kind of they're almost sort of, some of them, they're not. Drivers, print subsystems. So in applications, we have things like SK-1, Krita, Scribes. Those do pretty good job. I mean, like Scribes is the full high-end publishing tool. You can crank out anything at least, I think at least as good as any other proprietary publishing tool out there. And you send it to the print house, you get the book from Amazon in your hand and it looks nice. I have some, but I didn't bring it because of the weight. Inkscape, which I help work on, is mostly there. There's a couple things. Like you can work in good full multi-color print with spots and whatever other overlays you want. But if you go to export a PDF directly from Inkscape, it gets flattened out to RGB and just is not there. Again, they're working on moving there. They're taking their time, but they're trying to do it right. The print specific workflow needs a little work. Last I spoke with them, they may or may not have figured out all the issues yet. Mostly the usability is, the usability people they have improving it now and the core technical people never worked in print. They don't know some of the trickiness. So they think, oh, it's simple. Just don't worry about it. Doesn't quite work. But then you also have a lot of applications that don't do anything but probably don't have to. I mean, your web browser. Close enough. You do just a little bit. Everything else is good. Emacs. I don't know anymore specifically where Emacs needs to be doing color management. Even though when I open it up and in current Emacs, if I open an SVG, I get it showing up as a graphic inside the Emacs window. But that's someone else's code. So I mentioned the libraries having issues. You have the toolkit libraries and the dedicated libraries. Toolkits like GTK and QTE applications are built on top of. The thing there is if you get those fixed correctly to at least handle pass through of the advanced data and fall back to the common end users, simple cases, then all the applications built on top of those, including all the KDE apps and all the GNOME apps, will gain from that. So occasionally they're going to need a little bit of tweaking now here and there. But they'll come through pretty well. If you know what to be done. Dedicated libraries for more graphic specific Cairo poplar, GhostScript, Compa, ICC, that's I, by the way. Cairo is the graphics rendering API. Carl Worth, who's wandering around here somewhere, has been working on that forever. He's gotten, that's what Inkscape uses to export PDF. It does not have good print output yet, because we haven't finished defining the API. The good news is we are almost there. Poplar Inkscape, for instance, uses that to read PDF. We need to bump that up. GhostScript, who here is familiar with GhostScript? About half. So the open source postscript renderer and interpreter that's used all over the place on the Linux desktop. Last year, in fact, at the LibraGraphics MiniConf at LCA 2010, gave the maintainer of that, gave a good presentation about how they were just finishing switching it all over to be clean and ICC based and allow profiles and multiple channels and all the good stuff. So that's, that one's almost pretty much done. And Comp IBC is a new one. If you care about making your app do the right thing, you might Google that one to see what it is. So then we have print subsystems, Cups, which is running all over the place. It's hiding in OS 10, kind of sort of maybe, I don't know, the latest state of branching. But it's common and established for serving a lot of print needs and that has cleaned up a lot. Gutenprint kind of rides on top of that and on top of GhostScript and can do some of the, used to be the GIMP print code, got moved out to be a shared common thing. Google Cloud Print. Now that's another very new release this week. The word I've heard most often in referring to it was interesting. I have my file here. I'm going to send it up to Google's cloud and wait and then they'll send it down to my printer over here and then it will come out. Of course I have to be connected to cloud. I have to be logged in. I don't have a Google Print enabled printer because no one's making them yet. So I have to run a proxy. Except they only have a proxy for Windows right now. Oh okay just put that on. I'll try it. No but you have to be there and logged in for it to actually work. Why don't I just plug in a cable? Come on. And it turns out the proxy is actually Chrome. So it's intended to help Android devices and Chrome OS. Might be interesting. Might be able to do a good job for some of the areas. Some of the things it's good for may not need any color management or advanced color printing because it's not going to serve that market. You know I don't know it's new. Very interesting to see what goes on with that. And let's not even start with the security implications. So where as I mentioned with this year being I think very interesting and pivotal where are things standing. Well let's see. There are experts all over the place at many different levels and many different areas. People who are really good at drivers. People who are really good at apps. People who are great at understanding the artistic creative process and who teach photography classes and who hack on the code all at the same time. Things like this. Really nice. People who do the hardcore low-level math of a color management system and few that have written their own all available for everyone to use openly. Applications. Yeah there's a few people who know applications here and there. I fall into that wonderful point where we contact the users. Print drivers usually don't interface with the users. Ups. Kind of do. Now in this field things have been very dynamic literally just last year last week or so as I was getting ready to fly down here I thought oh great I'll finish my slides up before I come have my talk all typed up so I can have notes in the slide deck and everything. Then someone went and released a new daemon that fits right in the middle of this whole thing and does things the way he said here's this brand new beta try it out tell me what you think where should I change it. Literally hundreds of messages showed up on that mail thread just one thread just this in the last well two weeks now since it happened. Very active but the good news is everybody is on there. You have the guys who write the application. The guys who write the printer drivers. You the go script guys. You have the guys who do the CMS and a couple of us who do applications all communicating with each other. It can form in each other how stupid we each are and how we're just not getting it. Hopefully and that's why I went to Ken McKeney's talk on Wacka Droid and trolling and understanding and extracting our requirements. This isn't anywhere near that you know confrontational but it's it's helpful. It's coming along. So as the state of field is very interesting in everything else now moving forward though is what well where is the problem where is it still an issue. Well the painful cases involve trapping masking knockout overprint related terms some depends where you've been trained and what you're used to you might know things as different names. Then there's an idea of rich black. How many people are familiar with rich black or true black? Three, okay. And then and then there's black text which is something completely different. Then those things we do need to allow control over. I don't care what anyone argues who's used to doing photographs and everything. People who do real print on real offset press do need to be able to control these things. Some of the others such as the beautiful artists who did all the beautiful work on the LCA 2010 shirts and worked so beautifully with the printers to come up with an amazing piece of art out of that. You're down to tweaking ink limits, dot size, halftone angles and printings. So although to understand that one how many people are familiar with the details of halftoning? Angles, LPI, screening, handful. Okay, so I have this handy little reference I pulled from Wikimedia Commons. I think it was the Commons. Wikimedia has a great article explaining this if you care about the technical details, but to go over it in general. Four colors, cyan, magenta, yellow and key which is black. K comes from key. Anyway those four colors you can't actually mix the colors. So what the way offset press works is they make little dots in different patterns at different angles and overlay them so that you get different these different patterns that from any distance your eye blurs together into the appearance of a specific color. So in essence that's the root of the problem. Once you start to get in like that you used to have to create these little dot files yourself. Then you used to have to go to a high-end rip to do these and produce them and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars per separation and you know that's moving away now but still you know that's the low level ugliness. So it really helps especially to keep this in mind is that when you try to print something precise the printing process is creating these little patterns of dots of all sorts of different colors and different sizes at different angles that kind of if you look at the edges of something that's been printed especially if you pull up a magnifier the edges of everything are all blurry. Now in photographs that's great because everything naturally blurs into each other a little bit anyway so so we're good there. But flipping order on you in case you may have expected the other I'm going to mention black text. So if you're printing a small little eight point word for your fine print and you're trying to make that letter visible and they're made up of big blobs of shapes kind of near each other you're not going to be able to see anything. So when you go into text and other things like that you want to say no no no don't use the patterning and mixing inks and all that just use one ink solid edge as fine as you can that's what you need to do. And that keeps the edges crisp keeps small things visible sometimes it makes things worse sometimes it makes it better it depends on the situation a good graphic designer knows this and we'll check and see and you get the results in your hand after it's been created by a good graphic designer and a bad graphic designer and you can tell the difference and you can tell why those people are worth the money they charge. Then there's this other idea of rich black which is not black text this is something different this is where black is not black. If you define black as printing only the black ink when it comes up on paper that black ink won't be able to get quite full saturation so if you add a little cyan a little magenta a little yellow also in that same area in the right combination for that paper you'll get a good black that's not brown or muddy that looks even better or sometimes you're being artistic you want it to be a warm black or a cool black you can twink by adding a little more cyan or a little more red to warm it up or cool it down and you can graphically a good graphic designer can pull out this kind of stuff and make it beautiful and then the really fun one is trapping masking over print knockout that's what we're talking about here so I had a quick little overview showing in the top corner the expected results the next to it can you see anything wrong with the one at the top on the right here's the problem those inks were printed separately we're not perfect and you're when you don't pay thousands of dollars per page on a print job you're not going to get perfect print either it's going to shift off maybe a little and the more it shifts the more gaps and overlaps and muddying and everything you're going to get or in the middle on the left there it's a little bit smaller than you thought notice there's a little white kind of exposed between the two so you want to prevent any of those two happen so in the middle on the right that is the common solution you get that is by making the one color so you take away the blue first of all because if you put blue ink and or the inks that result in blue and the ink that's that result in yellow on the same spot on the page you're going to get a muddy green you're not going to get blue blue so it has to cut out not print blue where you're going to be printing the yellow in this case but in the bottom two I have a little zoomed in so you can see what's going on is on the left that's the ideal perfect what I wanted that's what I designed that's what I saw my graphic app on my desktop so I thought I was good but no I'm a professional I know I have to make it a little bigger so the yellow of the S was made a little bigger than the negative cut out of where it's not going to be printing blue so there'll be a bit of an overlap and what in theory what you want is just enough overlap to be 100 percent sure you don't leave any white gaps but not too much overlap so that you cause color blurring or any other problem like that this is subjective you don't want this in a photo you do want it on a logo you don't want it in text on somebody's shirts in a picture you do want on it on text that's been overlaid on the picture that's your corporate slogan you know you can't leave that to the automated back end the designer has to throw that in so just to sum up before the final phase first of all here what can you do give number one thing give feedback and collect up simple use cases for the usability of people you just tell them oh you said I don't need these buttons in my dialogue but how can I end up with this when I go to print how can I control the knockout oh I didn't think about what you know bring it up and then discuss find out what's going on the mailing lists are all public and then tell just maybe just tell the developers of the apps you use that you want the good power you want to be able to do everything you don't want them to say oh you're just a stupid little average user we're not going to let you do anything professional quality and then you're going to wind up very quick the last few minutes with a bit of research because what's the talk without some research so I was thinking as I was getting ready how should I do research and show you some just quick concrete example of a little bit of the color issues you have to deal with and maybe control and I realized my recycle bin so I just one morning before I took everything out I went through the boxes very quickly and pulled pieces out and cut cut out what actually is in my house so that you guys can see and use it well that's not so useful let's let's see if you can actually see it okay so here's a sample and there's just your basic four color print on a box CMYK promise it was looking a little washed out the box itself seemed to be making just not that exciting for a product that's maybe not what you want but you know it got the job done you know okay just take your RGB and automatically convert to CMYK okay that might work but then I had another box there was also CMYK that had some better printing on it looked at much nicer box and you could tell they add some quality on the production quality but what is slightly hard to see here but if you download the slide deck you'll be able to see so they had cyan magenta yellow then they created blue by mixing two of those they created red by mixing two other so and then they created green by mixing two of the others you go to work apedia they'll tell you which gives you what but the last two the bottom one is black check the slides though but the one above it is cyan magenta and yellow all put together in theory would be black but it's really just a very very dark gray so you can check the slide on that one now here's another common thing is that CMYK nice little thing and we have some good registration marks those are the little like targets that let them line up the results of the print to keep it more in line but this place had six inks not four so I checked they had cyan magenta and yellow black then they had a spot color which is some maybe Pantone color or something then they also had a deep gold metallic ink also on there they were just printed in solids places in a couple spots in the package so that the goldish color you can't tell here but it's actually a metallic ink has to be printed separately you can't you see my key to fake that and then I just found one that was a quick little one with three little spot colors not even mixed blending inks to make colors and the registration you know the nothing's quite lined up but it was just a very cheap large mass produced product that didn't care and that was fine then we have one that was six color ink and they add ochre and green and in the registration marks well first of all there they're a little bit off not as bad as that other package but I noticed something interesting they had a little letter O and a little letter G the O was actually green and the G was actually ochre so they turns out in the next package of the same type of product from the same manufacturer they just got rid of those letters anyway because they kind of you know oops okay but here you have six different inks that are all six are mixed to create the dot pattern so that's and this is just common samples so if this is a very common thing to find in the street someone might need it and then I measured the values just to see what's going on because you need some raw data so I took a photograph of all of them all at once measure the RGB's gave them SUV or you can't tell what's going on but then you know I grafted a little and we can see the first print that I said looked anemic its values are different from the others the others are pretty well in line so for industries doing good but you know depending on what their needs are they get different so given all that hopefully we'll give at least something to bring you to your mind some pause and after some reflection you might get some questions or maybe later this week so we'll start now see anyone have question as a user of inkscape would you recommend that I export things to SVG import them in SK-1 before I print them well as a user inkscape it depends on I have not checked what SK-1 does on import yet in general it that does a really good job printing or Scribes now Scribes doesn't import all SVG features but it does do the color management part of it so if you've tagged something to be a special ICC profile color for a certain plate Scribes will pull it in for sure SK-1 if it doesn't it should take just a tiny little tweak on their part so those are the two good ways to get good print output or going into those two programs or questions sorry this is a bit sideways but you mentioned color calibration of displays earlier yes is there what's the technique you use on Linux for collaborating LCD so that's a good good question you can get hardware colorimeters and I happen to have one here this hard type of hardware runs maybe fifty to a hundred dollars and meant many of the consumer level ones that are all down at that price are well supported under Linux in fact I took this one over to Andrew McMillan the other day plugged into his Debian box we had a little bit of hardware wrestling had to plug into a hub but then boom boom boom he's got a good calibration in you know overall including problems half an hour so then the next time he does this you'll probably take him five or ten minutes to recalibrate later names of these well this particular one is the Pantone or X-Rite Huey Pro depends who bought it when and one company bought another but this one is directly supported into Linux if you go to the Argyle CMS website that lists all the different hardware that software works with and that's what I use to run the calibration this time Pantone's a proprietary product that you need to license from the company what should we be doing instead there are certain things out there certain ways to do certain other things one of the things is the way a lot of this comes down to is intellectual property laws and distribution and this and that inkscape as an application isn't allowed to put that to give that to users but end users can pull down files that have rough approximations and then of course when you go out to print you could do things in purple and yellow and that you just when you go to your print house you have it labeled as Pantone 185 when they print out a plate it's just going to be black it doesn't matter but there are some palette management software out there that will go out and actually download it as a user you can go to Pantone's website and download the proof the the color palette files yourself that has RGB equivalents that are somewhat rough and then Scribes as a project has been collaborating with a lot of commercial vendors out there I don't know if they've explicitly pulled in Pantone yet but the German equivalent of Pantone has already given them files and given them permission to distribute with an X version some local color systems and including I think in New Zealand resin print or paints has been working very well with them and supplying them with the information and they've stuck up a very good you know balance of just addressing enough of the commercial vendors concern so that the commercial vendor says okay go ahead and distribute these files read only users can make their own files derived off of it but we want ours to be correct that's all and that's not an unreasonable thing any more questions okay let's put our hands together for our speaker now on behalf of LCA I'd like to give John this bowl which is made from Queensland macadamia nuts thank you at the flooded warehouse as you may have heard about