[Openicc] CC Profiles In X Specification and dispwin

[Alastair M. Robinson]

Hi,

Robert Krawitz wrote:

> 1) PPD files.  The less said, the better.  I think one of our dogs
> threw up a few of them this morning.

LOL

> But if you're willing to solve it for one particular RIP (say,
> PhotoPrint, or the Cinepaint/Gutenprint plugin, or the GIMP/Gutenprint
> plugin), it shouldn't be too hard to solve, at least for a prototype.

As you say, solving it for a particular RIP is easy enough to prototype. 
  I've mentioned before that I've hacked together a quick-and-dirty 
solution using a shell-script backend for CUPS, which calls PhotoPrint 
to do the actual rasterizing.  I mention it now mainly because of how 
the user-facing side of this works:

In the CUPS backend script, before running PhotoPrint I run a small 
program on the PostScript data which searches for a specific comment and 
if found extracts a PhotoPrint preset name from it.  Thus, when printing 
from within OpenOffice or any other program that can deal with PPD 
options, I can use a single option to select paper type, resolution, 
print settings, and a colour-profile to go with them, all bundled up 
into a single option.  The PPD portion looks like this:

*OpenUI *PPPreset/PhotoPrint Preset: PickOne
*OrderDependency: 10 AnySetup *PPPreset
*DefaultPreset: R300_Tesco
*PPPreset R300_Tesco/R300 Matte:	"%%GSPhotoPrintPreset: 
R300_Tesco_20060906.preset"
*PPPreset R300_Glossy/R300 Glossy:	"%%GSPhotoPrintPreset: 
R300_7DayShop_Glossy_20060906.preset"
*PPPreset R300_Plain/R300 Plain:	"%%GSPhotoPrintPreset: 
R300_Plain_20061020.preset"
*CloseUI: *PPPreset

This takes care of some, but not all of the repeatability issues that 
have been mentioned here - at the expense of course of having to modify 
a preset file to make any change to the print settings.  This is no 
hardship when using profiles, however - since you want to avoid changing 
the print settings if at all possible!

This is of course merely a quick-and-dirty prototype - but perhaps 
something worth considering - having an "admin" tool to create presets 
which place the printer in a predictable state, and having them 
selectable by the user when printing?

> I'm participating on this (and colorsync-users) precisely for this reason.

When I build profiles using Argyll for Gutenprint-driven printers, I 
generally see very impressively low mean- and maximum-error reports. :)

All the best,
--
Alastair M. Robinson