[CREATE] colour lists; in Oyranos?

[Craig Bradney]

On Thursday 15 September 2005 09:51, Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> small intro:
> my name is Kai-Uwe Behrmann. I work on gtk1 CinePaint and Oyranos, a
> colour management library. <www.cinepaint.org> <www.oyranos.org>
>
> The matter I like to write about is colour lists naming and
> communication. You described some internal formats on the web site. All
> they are ascii based. Well, I like the idea of human readable files.
>
> Anyway the ICC has allready included a way to describe such colour patches
> in an ICC profile. See <www.color.org> for the spec. A binary format.
>
> I interprete such files in ICC Examin, my GPL licensed ICC profile viewer,
> and use them for color space visualisations in CinePaint. A small plug-in
> writes in CinePaint the colour list profiles. So the code is in place.
>
> the pro about ascii (xml profiles - maybe like in Microsoft Longhorn):
> o they is human readable
> o easy editable
> o pretty good parsing
>
> the pro for binary (ICC profiles):
> o small
> o fast
> o established format in the colour industry
>
> What I offer is to add an colour list API into Oyranos to adress the
> matter. This means reading and writing patches and collections in the ICC
> way (ICC1V42.pdf Section 10.14 namedColor2Type):
>
> o colour space identifer ("Rgb")
> o identifer; 4 chars
> o number of patches
> o number of device channels - should be the same like the colour space
>   channels
> o common prefix
> o common suffix
>   - first name
>   - first colours CIELab as 16-bit integer
>   - first colours Device channels as 16-bit integer
>
>   - next colour
>   ...
>
> You can then write named colour lists as ICC profiles, and write some
> ascii back from an ICC ncl2 Profile.
>
> What does you think about this idea? Would you make usage from?

All of the applications (erm.. Scribus, Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, Cinepaint, 
OpenOffice.org etc etc) need to be able to run without a colour system being 
installed or at least active.

a) Many people don't have profiles
b) Many don't know how to create one
c) Many don't have a need for one (no need for colour management either)
d) Many will have equipment not "worth" profiling (older/cheap LCDs, older 
CRTs etc, or simply those without manufacturers' drivers or profiles.)

I think the best way is still an XML based file, but as profiling is important 
to many, if the colour sets are defined with a certain target in mind then 
they could reference an ICC profile, if that makes sense. When both are used 
in combination, you get the same effect as above, I think. Perhaps the 
possibility to import/export from a profile into an XML format would also be 
of use. This would also lead to binary conversion from XML, and hence the 
ability to fit with the industry that wants such formats.

regards
Craig