Set Print Output to dark blue and not black

• Aug 31, 2019 - 12:29

Hello,

This may not be in the correct forum, so apologies in advance.

I have a dyslexic singer on one of my choirs. He requires sheet music to be printed with blue ink; this is notes and staves, not just text, on cream paper.

How do I set the music to be in blue?

Many thanks


Comments

In reply to by Shoichi

You also can process an exported PDF with the commandline utility Ghostscript.
On Linux this command works:
gs -o output.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -c "{0.5 exp}{0.5 exp}{0 exp}{0.5 exp} setcolortransfer" -f input.pdf

The values between the {} are the CMYK color values (cyan magenta yellow black)
To find values of a "Blue" I looked here:
https://www.december.com/html/spec/colorcmyk.html

On Windows you could write a batch-file (.bat) with the following code inside:
for %%a in (%*) do "C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.21\bin\gswin32c.exe" -o %%a_blue.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -c "{0.5 exp}{0.5 exp}{0 exp}{0.5 exp} setcolortransfer" -f %%a

Just edit the path to your installed Ghostscript .exe
Now you can drag and drop a PDF onto the .bat-file and a new PDF will be created in the same folder.

Attachment Size
Arlekin_guitarchords.pdf_blue.pdf 57.46 KB
black_to_blue_bat.zip 305 bytes

I would wonder if maybe there isn't a way to have a special printer driver for that, or something else at the global / OS level. Doesn't seem like the sort of thing each application should have to invent for itself.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Yes, would be nice to have an easier way.

I have to add a little correction to the above code. For the colors density to work correctly it is also needed to convert the PDF from rgb to CMYK. BTW the last value K doesn't seem to do anything, So the density of the colors only depends on the first 3 values CMY.

This is the code:
gs -o output.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceCMYK -sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK -sColorConversionStrategyForImages=CMYK -c "{0.5 exp}{0.5 exp}{0 exp}{0.5 exp} setcolortransfer" -f input.pdf

And this is the code for the Windows .bat file:
for %%a in (%*) do "C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.21\bin\gswin32c.exe" -o %%a_blue.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceCMYK -sColorConversionStrategy=CMYK -sColorConversionStrategyForImages=CMYK -c "{0.5 exp}{0.5 exp}{0 exp}{0.5 exp} setcolortransfer" -f %%a

Attachment Size
black_to_blue_bat.zip 377 bytes

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