The only thing I could think of that might happen is that the objects would change to solid black (0,0,0 on the RGB scale) with the alpha channel reduced by a certain percentage depending on the lightness/darkness of the shade of gray (which would actually create a transparency it seems to me - a no-no for some book printing vendors). Grays are made up of equal levels of all three color spaces as you all know, so that made me wonder if grayscaling objects would somehow change that. Without thinking much about it, when I was creating my graphics I used RGB color space to create the shades of gray that I wanted. With that in mind, a few more comments/questions:

Since my original post I have done some subsequent research which made me more informed and aware, and reminded me that simple things are often more - sometimes much more - complex than they first appear.

The second link seems to me a huge amount of work bringing in another program (GIMP) and going through a number of steps for my purposes. I've poked around in Inkscape and the only place to apply grayscale to an image that I can find is via Extensions > Color > Grayscale, seemingly confirming that grayscale can only be applied to color images/graphics. The possible unknown for me is if there is some sort of useful metadata applied to a graphic when applying grayscale that is necessary even if it was originally created in black and gray. In other words, grayscale is only appropriate and necessary for converting color images to b+w. It would seem to me that these are already in grayscale by definition ( a requirement for b+w print books), and therefore there is no need for me to go through all of them and convert each one to grayscale.

This may seem like a duh! question with an obvious answer, but I'd like to confirm:Īs stated in a previous post, my line drawings for my print book use solid black lines, lines in two shades of gray, and a few gray gradients (i.e.

Inkscape gcode grayscale