Name

DVISep - extract colour separations from a DVI file

Synopsis

dvisep [-v] [-q] [-c colourfile] [-s separation] [-n] [-p] [-u] [-o] [-k] [-f] [in.dvi]

Description

DVISep creates separation files for process and spot colours from a DVI file. It normally takes one input DVI file, and outputs one DVI file for each process colour and one DVI file for each spot colour in the input file.

The colours recognised use the same syntax as Tomas Rokicki's dvips driver, with the exception of the double quote form. DVISep reads a colour specification file, which gives details of the named colours which can appear in the DVI file. The format of this file is :

name	colourspace	params...

where name is the name to the colour, colourspace is one of cmyk, rgb, hsb, gray, or spot, and params are the parameters required for the colour space. There are four numeric parameters for cmyk, three for rgb and hsb, and one for gray. The spot colour space takes two parameters, a plate name and a tint value, and an optional keyword which indicates if the colour is to overprint or knockout.

The -c option causes an additional colour specification file to be read; definitions in it override previous colour specifications.

The -o and -k options switch between overprint and knockout for the process separations.

Undercolour removal and full black generation for RGB and HSB colour spaces are turned on with the -u flag.

Normally, there is nothing in the separation files to identify the actual separation. The -n option causes a special command identifies the separation to be written to the output file, on the first page.

The -s option causes a single separation file to be written out. The -p causes the output to be written to standard output; this option requires that -s is specified too, to restrict the output to a single separation.

The separation are written to files with the same name as the spot or processs colours, and the extension .dvi. On systems with restricted file names length, dvisep uses a heuristic method to reduce the file name length. To prevent accidental overwriting of other files, it will abort with an error if the an output file already exists. The -f option forces dvisep to overwrite existing files if it can.

If no input file is specified on the command line, the input is read from the standard input.

Examples

To separation to four process colour files and whatever spot colours may be in the input file, with undercolour removal and knockout by default:

dvisep -u -k input.dvi

The black separation can be extracted and filtered through another program with the following command:

dvisep -p -s Black input.dvi | ...

Last modified on 12th February 2004 by angus@harlequin.co.uk