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LGM 2025 - Printing Maps with Spot Colors
… using Qgis and Scribus with a little help from Inkscape, and Ghostscript.
A happy-ending story about finding out the tips and tricks along the way.
Last November, we've been comissioned to produce a small series of printed
maps for a cultural center in Lessines, Belgium, to celebrate memories of
Louis Scutenaire and René Magritte. We aimed for a project using three colors,
and decided to go for spot color printing - using libre graphics tools, mainly
QGIS for the design of the map, and Scribus for layout elements and to prepare
the pdfs for printing.
We also used Inkscape to vectorize some small illustrations, as well as
Ghostscript to check and sometimes fix the resulting PDFs.
Then, once we decided that it would be spot color printing, we had to find
out a workflow from QGIS to Scribus in order to produce PDFs for spot-color
printing. It was not without a few obstacles that we encountered, as both
QGIS and Scribus present limitations in terms of color processing or vector
rendering.
We will present our productive investigation into both QGIS and Scribus,
describe how we use QGIS functionalities to optimize the maps for spot color
printing and show the tips and tricks we learned along the way - and share
the results, hoping to inspire other mapmakers around to give it a try.
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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By … using Qgis and Scribus with a little help from Inkscape, and Ghostscript.
A happy-ending story about finding out the tips and tricks along the way.
Last November, we've been comissioned to produce a small series of printed
maps for a cultural center in Lessines, Belgium, to celebrate memories of
Louis Scutenaire and René Magritte. We aimed for a project using three colors,
and decided to go for spot color printing - using libre graphics tools, mainly
QGIS for the design of the map, and Scribus for layout elements and to prepare
the pdfs for printing.
We also used Inkscape to vectorize some small illustrations, as well as
Ghostscript to check and sometimes fix the resulting PDFs.
Then, once we decided that it would be spot color printing, we had to find
out a workflow from QGIS to Scribus in order to produce PDFs for spot-color
printing. It was not without a few obstacles that we encountered, as both
QGIS and Scribus present limitations in terms of color processing or vector
rendering.
We will present our productive investigation into both QGIS and Scribus,
describe how we use QGIS functionalities to optimize the maps for spot color
printing and show the tips and tricks we learned along the way - and share
the results, hoping to inspire other mapmakers around to give it a try.
Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/