[XeTeX] cmyk colour support broken?

[Jonathan Kew]

On 19 May 2006, at 4:18 pm, William Adams wrote:

> On May 19, 2006, at 11:03 AM, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> This is probably because xdv2pdf doesn't really know how to do CMYK
>> colo[u]r; it converts it internally to RGB and passes that on
>> CoreGraphics when it draws the text.
>>
>> The original reason for this is that the first form of color
>> supported in XeTeX was the font attribute (rather than \specials),
>> which was rendered directly through ATSUI styles; and ATSUI only
>> supports RGB(A) color specification. This is no longer how things
>> work; I don't draw through ATSUI any more, but directly with
>> CoreGraphics, having used ATSUI to get the positioned glyphs -- so in
>> principle, I think xdv2pdf could be revised to use proper CG color
>> spaces, etc. Just hasn't happened yet. Sorry!
>>
>> If you're only using OpenType (rather than AAT) fonts, and could
>> render the document on Linux using xdvipdfmx as the driver, that
>> might work better -- I don't know what the color support is like
>> there, but it's probably better.
>
> any hope of being able to compile xdvipdfmx for Mac OS X?

Yes, that's one of my goals.

It can be compiled right now, if you have appropriate libraries and  
header files installed (fontconfig and freetype are the main ones  
that come to mind). But it has at least one serious limitation that  
means it's not ready to ship as an alternative to xdv2pdf just yet:  
it won't handle fonts in suitcase or .dfont files. If you're working  
with .otf or (Windows-style) .ttf files, it might be worth a try.

Oh, graphics support is fairly limited at this point, too. But it's  
supposed to handle .jpg and .png, at least.

JK