Set Print Output to dark blue and not black
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
Select the items, use Inspector to change color.
In reply to Select the items, use… 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.
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 I would wonder if maybe… 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