{"guid":"d856d510-e353-549e-9e4c-111e7fdc6d2e","title":"Printing Maps with Spot Colors","subtitle":null,"slug":"lgm25-upstream-2025-83668-printing-maps-with-spot-colors","link":"https://pretalx.c3voc.de/lgm25-upstream-2025/talk/1308567759/","description":"… using Qgis and Scribus with a little help from Inkscape, and Ghostscript.\n\n### A happy-ending story about finding out the tips and tricks along the way.\n\nLast November, we've been comissioned to produce a small series of printed\nmaps for a cultural center in Lessines, Belgium, to celebrate memories of\nLouis Scutenaire and René Magritte. We aimed for a project using three colors,\nand decided to go for spot color printing - using libre graphics tools, mainly\nQGIS for the design of the map, and Scribus for layout elements and to prepare\nthe pdfs for printing.\n\nWe also used Inkscape to vectorize some small illustrations, as well as\nGhostscript to check and sometimes fix the resulting PDFs.\n\nThen, once we decided that it would be spot color printing, we had to find\nout a workflow from QGIS to Scribus in order to produce PDFs for spot-color\nprinting. It was not without a few obstacles that we encountered, as both\nQGIS and Scribus present limitations in terms of color processing or vector\nrendering.\n\nWe will present our productive investigation into both QGIS and Scribus,\ndescribe how we use QGIS functionalities to optimize the maps for spot color\nprinting and show the tips and tricks we learned along the way - and share\nthe results, hoping to inspire other mapmakers around to give it a try.\n\n![A](https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2025/img/events/printing_maps_with_spot_colors-feYCQ39ktaCeaGSR.png)\n\nLicensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","original_language":"eng","persons":["Atelier cartographique","Pierre Marchand","Julie Vanderhaeghen"],"tags":["83668","2025","lgm2025","main","lgm2025-eng","Day 4"],"view_count":124,"promoted":false,"date":"2025-05-31T11:00:00.000+02:00","release_date":"2025-05-31T00:00:00.000+02:00","updated_at":"2026-03-28T13:30:06.498+01:00","length":1880,"duration":1880,"thumb_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/events/lgm/2025/83668-d856d510-e353-549e-9e4c-111e7fdc6d2e.jpg","poster_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/events/lgm/2025/83668-d856d510-e353-549e-9e4c-111e7fdc6d2e_preview.jpg","timeline_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/events/lgm/2025/83668-d856d510-e353-549e-9e4c-111e7fdc6d2e.timeline.jpg","thumbnails_url":"https://static.media.ccc.de/media/events/lgm/2025/83668-d856d510-e353-549e-9e4c-111e7fdc6d2e.thumbnails.vtt","frontend_link":"https://media.ccc.de/v/lgm25-upstream-2025-83668-printing-maps-with-spot-colors","url":"https://api.media.ccc.de/public/events/d856d510-e353-549e-9e4c-111e7fdc6d2e","conference_title":"Libre Graphics Meeting 2025 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