Transparency flattening and the end of acrobat reader 9 for linux

[Konrad]

With the end of adobe acrobat reader 9 support for linux, the scribus dp workflow has lost its only method to do reliable transparency flattened. No security updates for the reader 9 means, it cannot be used for serious work and it is a serious thread for every installation – and it will be kicked out of distributions for this reason.

This is a really a mess for all print productions. In reality most print shops rely on printing only files without transparency – even 2014.

Therefore the very old story of  not being able to flatten transparency in scribus renders a lot of functions in this software to be useless. This was the reason for me to make some proposals to overcome this. Unfortunately I am no software coder, I can only try to feed in some ideas, hoping someone will try to implement it.

Proposal for simple transparency flattening:

(a) For each page a profiled raster-image is exported, maybe this works best, having all elements in cmyk color space
(b) Any object with transparency is transformed to an image frame object and replace the original object. This are:
    (1) any frames with transparency <100 % set in their properties
    (2) image frames with images with alpha channels
    (3) will it be necessary to include all images with scribus image manipulations as well?
(c) The background image is loaded to the the image frame object from step (b). The origin of the image is shifted according to the negative values of the position of the image frame object to align the image. For this step the following precautions will be kept in mind, which I found out working with scribus 1.4.3:

    (1) Text Object without a background color or a color frame can be directly converted to a path object and from there to an image object. All rotations of the original image object are applied to the coordinates of the frame, the image can be aligned simply. This image fills the characters only.
    (2) All other Objects can be handled even by transforming to an image frame, but the rotation of the orignal object has to be applied to simply align the flattend image.
    (3) is it needed to add some extra space to the transformed object to include the contour lines?

Possible this is even possible on the level of a script language, to implement it without blocking the feature-freeze for scribus version 1.5.

I know, that this will probably to0 simplified, but please help to start a discussion in this field. Actually the end of adobe reader 9 for the linux community may be a real show-stopper.

Possible this is even possible on the level of a script language, to implement it without blocking the feature-freeze for scribus version 1.5.

I know, that this will probably to simplified, but please help to start a discussion in this field. Actually the end of adobe reader 9 for the linux community may be a real show-stopper.

Best regards, konrad