[Openicc] colord information

[Hal V. Engel]

On Friday, February 11, 2011 03:55:25 PM Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> On 2/12/11, Chris Murphy wrote:
> > And on open source, it may be next to impossible to get all the libraries
> > that deal with image file types to not drop metadata.
> 
> There are not so many widely used free/open source libraries that deal
> with image file types, to begin with. My impression is that at least
> half of the existing ones were written for small personal projects
> which, in return, aren't used much by people outside very small
> communities (if those even exist). Chances are that by fixing several
> most widely used ones we get 99% of users on the safe side, and the
> rest can take care of themselves.
> 
> Alexandre Prokoudine
> http://libregraphicsworld.org

I am not too worried about the truely community based open source 
libraries/utilities like poppler or the CPD.  These will eventually get fixed 
if for no other reason than the folks who maintain them don't like getting 
hounded by people like us and we will at some point start pushing patches and 
the like at them if they don't get to it.  My bigger concern is the stuff that 
is open source but under the control of a large corporation.  As an example of 
what could happen the Qt PDF print stuff is currently badly broken from a color 
point of view.  If Nokia decides that it doesn't care it could be years before 
this works and it may never get fixed.  Please I am just using Qt as an example 
of what could happen and it may turn out that they respond to our concerns in 
a timely manor and we have a PDF/X implementation in the next major Qt 
version.  But we simply don't know yet how this will go.

One other point is that even though there are a number of things that need 
work to get this all in place and these are the responsibility of a number of 
orginizations the number of libraries, utilities and apps involved in the 
actual print pipeline is not unusually high for systems type work.  Yes it is 
complex but It is finit and at this point we have most of the potential 
components identified and are starting to get an handle on what needs to be 
done to each of these.   In my experience that means we are actually making 
progress.  In some cases we even have more than one potential library/utility 
to handle things and if one does not work we have a plan B already in place.  
For example the PDF to raster functionality is critical and we can potentially 
use either poppler or Ghostscript.  We may end up with both working at some 
point but is does give us some flexibility to have some options.

Hal

Hal
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