Typesetting Control
Putting some text and a line on a page and producing accurate printable output isn’t expected to be that hard but I’ve tried some free software solutions like Inkscape and LibreOffice and they don’t seem to be able to do what I want (which is probably less difficult to accomplish than what most people want).
Inkscape doesn’t seem to be capable of producing PDFs with control over the inks used to define the colored objects even though it has the ability to assign colors to objects using multiple color systems. This limitation is seems to be because it stores the colors of objects as RGB regardless of how they are chosen as well as the fact that it uses cairo – which is an RGB-only graphics system – to produce the PDFs.
LibreOffice also has the ability to produce PDFs (and actually has a highly respectable PDF export system) but its internal document color limitations (RGB only) seem to severely limit its suitability for doing what I want as well. I did, however, use LibreOffice Draw to prototype the layout of my designs.
Due to that crap, these graphical tools don’t appear to be useful for anything but photographic data or output to one-color or three-color output devices.
I’ve even tried plain TeX, which is probably the best general solution for my problem, but the hassles of getting custom fonts installed in a non-ridiculous manner eventually makes that unfeasible for me. I once learned how to do it but that was a long time ago.
Luckily some basic knowledge of PostScript that I have and some selective reading of the book “Practical PostScript” allowed me to produce human-readable replicas (significantly more human-readable than ODF XML) of the design prototypes done in LibreOffice using free software and the text editor of my choice. With about 100 narrow and comfortably spaced lines of PostScript I was able to produce the text I wanted with some sort of expectation of getting things to work. With Ghostscript’s feature set, I was even able to produce PDF/A-1b output with the deliberate color definitions, object positioning, and letter spacing that I had personally typed into my editor.
There are some files (EPS source and PDF/A-1b output) attached to this page with some business cards (with fake phone numbers) I made for myself. One is modeled after the current look of my website and contains my middle initial and the other looks like an album cover.