Hello

This is my first attempt to use Inkscape to design a very simple booklet cover. My child helped too.

I have a couple of questions about this design:

- I opted for the dimensions of an A4 to make it printable to that size. However when I printed it, it didn't give good results and colors weren't bright.
Can you please advise as how to improve the print quality?

- I tried to upload the svg to Dropbox but found that the file doesn't show the design but shows the text that I introduced earlier to make "the front cover" and removed later. It also shows some background colors that I don't remember choosing.
So I copied the design by selecting all shapes and pasting it in a new document. I did that because "select all" showed a network of zones I had no idea what they were. This worked well and I managed to upload the file on Dropbox.

Image:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zztzuguvz7pue ... 20back.png
svg file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l346bvkfjlp9j ... over.svg?m

Thank you very much
Nadia

Hello there,

For printing such basic drawings it is better to save them as a pdf and print that instead of an exported png.
That way you can avoid rasterisation of the image -which produced that little blurring between the rectangles you drew,
because they weren't aligned to the inkscape's basic 90 dpi grid.

You can improve the colours of your print by using a high quality photo printing paper.

If that's not enough, you are facing a journey in the different colour systems.
Colour matching is not an easy way between screens and prints.
Screens work in an rgb mode, most printers work in a cmyk colour mode.
And, many shades are out of the cmyk gamut.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space

So if you want to print exactly what's on your screen, calibrate your screen first,
then use colours from the cymk palette, convert your work to be in cmyk mode.
There are many topics here on that problem.
Then with a good printer, with a good paper, you can print exactly what's displayed on screen.

CMYK certainly can cover the whole visible gamut that RGB can, and that's merely talking about the colorspaces themselves. In reality what you deal with is the shortcomings of the display and ink technology at different price points. All pro printing outfits and pro design and print software use CMYK, that way you're working in the same colorspace for the document from design to print, forgiving that the monitor you work on converts it to RGB during design for display. Unfortunatelly the CMYK mode in inkscape is not a true CMYK profile/workflow, instead it's a pseudo CMYK. The files don't end up with a ISO standard CMYK profile, neither can it take advantage of some of the features that pro design/printing programs give you when working in CMYK space, like Register Black and so forth.
It is true though that color calibrating your monitor and printer will give you better results. Using the higher (photo) settings on the printer also helps, as will using non-cheapo inks.

Thank you very much for your kind help and useful tips.

I would look into this and try to see if I'll get good results with printing.