Taming OpenOffice.org

A reader left a comment on the draft of my self-publishing book with some detailed info about PDF export issues. With his permission, I’m copying that comment into this blog entry, so more people will see it.

*colorspace issue in pdf export*
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=81097

(Actually – OpenOffice 3.xx – OpenOffice export as rgb colorspace even you use only black text)
this is a critical bug I can’t understand why developpers have yet fixed

due to this critical bug, your pdf will have same colorspace (RGB), so, you cannot print your ONLY-BLACK-INK book exported to pdf, with offset, RGB, causes RIP (pre-printing process) will make four plates Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black), instead one (Black only), now, typography must spend much money for every plate, so you must convert to grayscale before submit to offset print service. please, you have a great blog, I hope more people know about this bug, so developpers are constrained to fix (now they think very few people know this and they can avoid to spend time to fix)

We need ability of select between: BLACK- CMYK – RGB in pdf export for professional printing

I found recently a trick to convert RGB colorspace to grayscale for professional printing

with ghostscript, type (in Linux and Windown both) all over one line
gs -sOutputFile=output.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 input.pdf < /dev/null

NOW, in Linux, print via CUPS, seleting GRAY from OpenOffice print options dialog. this second choice, ever works fine, the first may have problems with pdf exported via internal pdf driver of openoffice, due to custom font encoding. In fact, once converted, with gsview command line, you see above, is not more searchable (because text encoding is puzzled, even viewing and home printing seems fine)

ANOTHER PDF related question is about font encoding:

*NEVER SUBMIT FOR PRINTING PDF CREATED WITH OPTION: JPEG compression*
I discovered some time ago, OpenOffice, when performs jpeg compression on images, also do something to font encoding, and if you try to select text portions, you will give garbage text instead of corrected text