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I have an SVG graphic made with Inkscape which is designed for printing, i.e. I use CMYK colors (our corporate colors). I now need to provide this drawing as pixel data for the printing lab.

The problem:

Unfortunately, Inkscape only exports to PNG, which uses RGB colors. The PDF export does not seem to use CMYK colors.

I have tried:

I found a plugin called ExportPDFCMYK, but it's available for Linux only. I'm looking for a Windows solution.

Ok, so what I need is

  • an Inkscape plugin or standalone tool
  • that reads the SVG
  • and exports it to a CMYK compatible pixel data format (e.g. TIFF)
  • while restricting the output to the page size (there may be items overlapping the page boundary which I don't want to be exported)
  • and is gratis
  • and supports large files and resolutions (150 dpi, ~30.000 pixels)
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  • The usual workflow involves postprocessing your SVG with Scribus. Examples here, here, here, and here.
    – Juancho
    Commented Jun 16, 2017 at 14:44
  • @Juancho: ok, thanks for all the links. Seems available for Windows. I'll give it a try (scheduled for Tuesday).
    – Thomas Weller
    Commented Jun 16, 2017 at 14:49

1 Answer 1

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As explained in this post you can use Scribus with Inkscape to prepare press ready pdf file.

Scribus is another free, gratis, open source & cross platform program.

The steps are basically:

  1. Find out the colour profile that your printing service uses, download and install it.
  2. Set Scribus to use the same colour profile
  3. Load the svg file, needs to be single layer and all text converted to paths
  4. Remove unused colours
  5. Convert remaining colours
  6. Save as sla
  7. Export to pdf
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