[Openicc] meta data in test chart

[Robert Krawitz]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:44:21 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
> I don't thoroughly understand all of the components and how they
> interact with each other. But from a end-user advocate perspective,
> the very generic way I'd like it to work is that everything related
> to the print condition is a single sharable file. It would contain:
> the state of all drive dialog options such as resolution, screening,
> color mode, inkset, etc, any externally referenced calibration file,
> any externally referenced ICC profile. All in one shareable package.
>
> Now, can this be exported and imported from the print dialog driver
> window? There are advantages to this. Or would it be managed by a
> separate application? In that case we could choose presents to share
> and smash them all into a single shareable package: all ICC
> profiles, PPDs, settings, etc. for all of the chosen preset printing
> conditions.

In non-Macintosh CUPS based systems, the driver doesn't get its own
dialog; each app provides its own dialog (or uses the KDE or GTK
framework).  I had that argument with Mike Sweet for a while and lost,
so we're stuck with PPDs.  But PPD files don't have curve data types
or the like.  Sigh.

There are a couple of Gutenprint-based apps that do provide their own
print dialogs, but they're not PPD based: the Gutenprint plugin for
GIMP and PhotoPrint.  Those link to Gutenprint and generate raw
printer output which is passed uninterpreted through CUPS to the
printer.  The GIMP plugin uses an ad hoc format; PhotoPrint uses a
.ini type format (Alastair can speak more to that).

PPD files contain some things that shouldn't be shared as part of the
recipe.  In addition to things like paper size, they may also be
localized, and we don't want someone in, say, Denmark to have to use
the English translation.  Gutenprint has a tool (cups-genppdupdate)
that can fix the language of a PPD file, but that's not a general
solution.