[Openicc] Is CUPS the right place for printer color management...

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 7, 2011, at 8:41 PM, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> 
> I am almost 100% sure that InDesign (and Illustrator) does the same thing that Acrobat does when printing to a non-PS printer on Mac OS X...Generate a RASTER IMAGE and send that to print.  We have to, because Quartz can't handle the same complex PDFs (and imaging model in general) that our apps can.   So the only choice we have is raster.

That is true, but it ends up being a raster sent to Quartz PDFContext, which then produces a PDF print spool file. If you use application color matching for a desktop inkjet printer like an Epson printer, you're choosing an RGB ICC output device profile as the printer profile in InDesign's print dialog. It normalizes everything in the document to that space, rasterizes, and hands it to the OS as UNTAGGED. The OS the writes it out as a PDF print spool file, tagged as sRGB (seriously I'm not f'n kidding) and then at the back end it ASSUMES sRGB as the destination space as well, thereby ensuring a null transform, and getting the correct printed result. On OS X 10.5 and older, the source=destination space is Generic RGB. Same results.

So it works not only via null transform but through bogus tagging of the PDF print spool file. It was clearly not designed with an app like InDesign (or QuarkXPress) in mind. It's a very tricky situation to put it mildly. Which is why we've had so many problems with this scheme.

Chris
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