[Openicc] CUPS Color Management under Linux gets into distros

[Till Kamppeter]

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Hi,

we will have some color management in a distro soon. I have added Koji 
Otani's Poppler-based pdftoraster filter to the CUPS package for Ubuntu 
Natty (release end of April, currently available as the development 
branch of Ubuntu) and Debian unstable. This pdftoraster filter replaces 
the one shipped with Ghostscript and in addition to being much faster 
and more reliable with complex PDFs it implements CUPS' ICC profile 
support as described in the documentation:

http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/spec-ppd.html#cupsICCProfile
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/spec-raster.html#TABLE2
http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/raster-driver.html#COLOR

Otani-san, am I correct that with this pdftoraster we have ICC-profile 
support for CUPS Raster drivers as described in the CUPS doc? How do I 
supply a rendering intent? Are there any additional non-PPD options to 
supply to print jobs?

Color management experts from OpenICC and driver developers, please test 
this feature and report your experience here. You could ship ICC 
profiles for installation in /usr/share/cups/profile/ to improve your 
printer's output quality.

Color management experts from OpenICC, WDYT about this color management 
effort? Is this already a step forward? Is it at least the correct 
effort for consumer-level printing? What needs to be added to support 
pro and prosumer printing?

For testing you need the PDF printing workflow:

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/pdf_as_standard_print_job_format

This is already implemented in Ubuntu and Debian and the newest 
snapshots of Natty and unstable contain the new pdftoraster. Do a 
complete system update ("sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get 
dist-upgrade") after having booted or installed the system from a daily 
live CD or Alpha version. You must have the package cups of version 1.4.5-3.

On other distributions you have to install the PDF workflow by compiling 
from source, following the instructions on the page linked above.

Please report your experience here and discuss.

Patches are also welcome to make the pdftoraster of Ghostscript 
implementing CUPS' ICC profile support.

    Till


P. S.: In April there will be also a session on the OpenPrinting Summit 
about Color Management for printing with Linux.