[Openicc] Introduction / Gutenprint]

[Michael Sweet]

Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:
> ...
> This selection attributes are on the level of very generic profile 
> selection. I cannot imagine even canned profiles would fit in well.

Remember, the cupsICCProfile attribute is for the output device profile
only, which is only half of the color transform.  If you have incoming
CMYK data, then it will be associated with its own (possibly generic)
profile and will be used to convert to the PCS and then to the device
colorspace.

> ...
> At least one user defined path should be included. Otherwise one can not 
> install and use profiles without administrator rights.

There are serious security issues with user-defined paths.  It would
be possible to use symlinks, etc. under the profiles directory which
point to a user directory, e.g.:

     [done by admin user]
     ln -s /home/foo/.profiles /usr/share/cups/profiles/foo

     [user puts profiles in ~/.profiles and prints using profile]
     lp -o cupsICCProfile=foo/myneatokeenprofile.icc filename.jpg

By definition, that would mean that all profiles that are published
this way would be readable by everyone, so we don't want to enable
that by default...

> For further evolving of new ICC profile path standards on linux, would you 
> go with alternative path configurations?

Aside from security, CUPS is a network service so the traditional
filename scheme falls apart pretty quickly.  I *would* consider
adding support for URLs, e.g.:

     lp -o cupsICCProfile=http://foo/bar.icc filename.jpg

However, generic filename support simply is not secure and we will
not support it.

> How can an applications request a printer profile? This kind of 
> bidirectional communication is much desired. 

Currently the application must grab the PPD file, and then grab
the referenced profiles; we plan on exporting the profiles directory
on each CUPS server, e.g.:

     http://server:631/profiles/filename.icc

will return the named profile, however that will only work for non-
absolute filenames.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com