[Openicc] [argyllcms] Re: OT: PDF frustration

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

I am Till Kamppeter, leader of the OpenPrinting project at the Linux 
Foundation.

As most of you know, one of the projects of OpenPrinting is replacing 
PostScript by PDF as standard print job format. Perhaps this has made 
this thread come up.

Here is a page with everything about the PDF printing workflow: 
Motivation, how to set it up, and many links:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/PDF_as_Standard_Print_Job_Format

In Ubuntu Intrepid I have already implemented the PDF printing workflow.

One piece to get a PDF printing workflow on a CUPS-based Linux/Unix 
system are the ...topdf, pdftopdf, pdfto... CUPS filters, which Koji 
Otani (BBR Inc. Japan) and Tobias Hoffmann (Google Summer of Code) have 
written. Otanis-san has written all his filters based on Poppler, 
including pdftoraster.

Kai-Uwe, as you told in your posting we can expect full color management 
support earlier in Ghostscript than in Poppler. Therefore I started to 
create a pdftoraster filter based on Ghostscript. Unfortunately, the 
"cups" output device of Ghostscript or the PDF interpreter of 
Ghostscript have a bug which prevents Ghostscript from rendering PDF 
with the "cups" output device. With PostScript input it works perfectly. 
I have filed a bug report at Ghostscript:

http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=690101

If anyone volunteers for fixing this bug, I will happily upload the fix 
into Ghostscript's SVN repository and replace Otani-sans pdftoraster by 
my pdftoraster.

    Till


Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:
> Am 04.10.08, 11:44 -0700 schrieb Hal V. Engel:
>> handle it at the application level (like today).  The sad part about this is 
>> that ghostscript already has some CM capabilities thanks to Graeme and the 
>> ghostscript team is in the process of implementing complete support.  A PDF to 
>> raster CUPS filter based on ghostscript instead of poppler would likely have 
>> had full CM support long before most users systems had been converted to a PDF 
>> based printing work flow and all of these systems would have had CM by default 
>> at that point as part of the printing system.