[CREATE] ink/paper simulation

[Louis Desjardins]

Alastair M. Robinson a écrit :
> Hi :)
> 
> Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> 
>> Well, one of the users came up with a very smart idea: a (Corel
>> Painter-like) tool to simulate real paper and inks to see what
>> actually would happen to glyphs printed with a small font size with
>> different inks on different surfaces and with different colors, taking
>> trapping into consideration as well, especially on problematic parts
>> of shapes (narrow serifs, stroke variation etc., I fancy). A
>> font-proof, in fact. So a type designer could see this and apply
>> tweaks to his design.
> 
> Hmmmm - very interesting idea.  There are a huge number of variables to 
> take into account, though.

Exactly.

Let’s not turn this into something unusable. (Such as the paper formats 
in Scribus.) A huge list of whatever-can-be-the-printed-media is going 
to be completely useless. Please. Let’s not do that. Even if it’s so 
temptating again to let the whole world WE KNOW BETTER. We don’t.

And who cares anyway?

Really.

Let’s give a mean to users so they can set the background to whatever 
they wish in order to simulate the printing media. That is ok. (And btw, 
this is completely into the scope of color management). Let’s give some 
useful hints. But let’s not ask paper makers of the world to provide us 
with color info of their papers. We are never going to get out of this. 
The list is going to be endless and as useless as one can think a 
useless thing can be. Even if we can edit the list. Nobody but newbies 
are going to use this list and in the end it will be of no help to 
anybody. In this particular case, it is better to understand what’s 
going on than provide tools nobody will ever use.

This will be my only post on that subject. I am not ready at all to 
discuss this further as I find it is leading us absolutely nowhere.

Louis
> 
> I see several aspects to this, though there may well be others that I've 
> missed.
> 
> 1. Simulating paper colour - easy enough given colour profiles for media 
> and monitor.
> 
> 2. Simulating the effect of media texture.  This is where the effects 
> used by natural media painting programs are relevant - though I suspect 
> they're more of an artistic effect than rigorous simulation.
> 
> 2, Simulating the distortion caused by compromises in printing 
> technology - i.e. such as, (a) how easily do the enclosure in an "e" 
> fill in as ink spreads on uncoated paper, (b) how easily do strokes 
> start to disappear if you attempt to reverse them out of solid black or 
> (God forbid!) a composite colour, (c) how does the halftone screen 
> interact with character shapes at small sizes when various colours are 
> chosen.
> 
>> 1. Is anybody else thinking that it's a good idea?
> 
> Defintely
> 
>> 5. Is anybody volunteering? :)
> 
> Sadly, I no longer have enough time to make good progress on my existing 
> projects, so I can't take on anything else at the moment.  Interesting 
> ideas though, and I hope someone will be able to do something with it.
> 
> All the best,
> --
> Alastair M. Robinson
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> 


-- 
Louis Desjardins
Mardigrafe inc.
Graphisme et impression écologique
T 514 934 1353
F 514 934 3698
www.mardigrafe.com