[Openicc] ALL YOU NEED IS A PROFILE, THE MYTH. (WAS CC Profiles In X Specification and dispwin)

[Alastair M. Robinson]

Hi,

edmund ronald wrote:

>  Which means that hard-coded stuff inside the C files should be
> deprecated, and a documented CENTRAL FILE  containing all ink and
> dot-related parameters should be made available,

I like this idea in principle - I've had occasion to modify the 
Gutenprint tunings for two printers so far, and being able to do so 
without recompiling would certainly have made life easier.

 > Oh, and by the way there is such a thing as XML which has been created
 > exactly for this purpose of creating portable (parameter) files which
 > are both machine readable and human debuggable.

Gutenprint already makes significant use of XML - both internally and 
externally.  Both the list of available printers and papersizes are 
stored as XML files in the filesystem, and the current 
papertype-specific colour adjustments are in XML format, even though 
they're inlined in the C code (escp2-paper.c et al).

The parsing overhead of XML should not be ignored though.  Parsing the 
existing XML files adds a good 15 seconds to every valgrind test I 
perform on PhotoPrint, for instance.  For this reason, I'd rather see 
individual XML files containing a specific printer's tuning, parsed only 
when it's needed, rather than a single monolithic XML file containing 
everything.  Should make version-management easier too, if multiple 
people are going to be working on linearization.

All the best,
--
Alastair M. Robinson