[Openicc] CUPS Color Management under Linux gets into distros

[Till Kamppeter]

On 02/08/2011 10:14 PM, Hal V. Engel wrote:
> This page is not current as it has things like links to patches for
> poppler-0.11.x which I think add CM support similar to what is in
> poppler-0.12.0 and later. Most recent release is 0.16.2 and most distros
> will have version 0.14.4 or 0.14.5 as the stable version so no patches
> are required for most users unless they are running very old software.
>
>
> It has a section on GhostScript 8.64 when the current version is 9.0
> although 9.0 is not yet included in most distros as a stable version.

I will remove these old patches. I have always added new stuff to the 
page but not removed the old stuff.

> But it seems to me that any testing should be done using the latest
> version of GhostScript since this will likely be commonly used by the
> time the PDF printing work flow is in wide use. Also I noticed that
> Ghostscript appears to create a pdftoraster filter. To test this I just
> installed GhostScript-9.0 on my system (Gentoo so this is built from
> source) and it does create a pdftoraster as well as pstopxl and
> pstoraster filters. Interestingly the ebuild also installed
> poppler-data-0.4.,4 as a package that GhostScript is dependant on.
> Perhaps we should also test the GS V9 version of this as well since it
> may actually have better CM support than the poppler based filter (IE.
> maybe it supports rendering intent and/or uses the PDF OutputIntents to
> get the output profile for example).

Ghostscript's pdftoraster I used for a long time in Ubuntu. Without 
color management as this got only added with 9.00. Currently, I have 
packaged 9.01 (SVN snapshot) for Ubuntu Natty, but the pdftoraster 
(cups/pdftoraster.c) and Ghostscript's "cups" output device 
(cups/gdevcups.c) are not yet prepared for CM. If you (or someone on the 
list) could help here it would be great.

Due to Poppler being faster and more reliable as a PDF interpreter and 
due to Koji Otani having added CM support to his Poppler-based 
pdftoraster I have switched to this one in Ubuntu Natty. To avoid file 
name conflicts I have renamed it to pdftoraster-poppler and set the cost 
factor for it in the .convs files lower than the cost factor of 
Ghostscript's pdftoraster. This way both are installed in Ubuntu and the 
user/admin can switch to the other by changing the cost factors.

Any help to get the best possible printing color management solution for 
Ubuntu/Debian is appreciated.

    Till