Re: CSS overprinting

On Tue, 2013-06-18 at 20:17 -0700, Rik Cabanier wrote:
> This is indeed all true to create a prepress workflow.
> You forgot to include filter, blending and simple opacity. 
:-)

> These make
> printing at high quality fiendishly hard. (It took us at Adobe close to a
> decade to get it right)
> 
> I think what is needed, is a way to reliably export to a PDF file with CMYK
> and spot colors from a web page. Prepress systems and applications (such as
> InDesign, QuarkXpress or Acrobat) have all the logic to produce the right
> output.
> Putting all this logic in the browser is unlikely to happen.

Long term I see InDesign & Quark moving into the browser, which becomes
an operating system with a million lines of code. I'm not sure that I
like this vision particularly but it's what's happening.

In that vision yes, the browser does the prepress stuff too.

Right now, though, I'm aiming for
. CSS powerful enough to describe the processes (so that e.g. Quark or
InDesign could handle it, or Antenna House or RenderX or...)
. web browsers can do basic typography enough for most simple
publications, including print-on-demand book kiosks that are springing
up
. another application can take over for higher end work, e.g. where
people want "advanced" things like page numbers :D yes, as long as the
hooks are there in the markup and the CSS
. we must not do anything now that would make it difficult or impossible
to do the right thing later.

At any rate I think we both agree that overprinting is a prepress
function today.

Best,

Liam



-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Wednesday, 19 June 2013 06:26:54 UTC