[Openicc] CUPS Color Management under Linux gets into distros

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 8, 2011, at 9:33 AM, Till Kamppeter wrote:

> we will have some color management in a distro soon. I have added Koji Otani's Poppler-based pdftoraster filter to the CUPS package for Ubuntu Natty (release end of April, currently available as the development branch of Ubuntu) and Debian unstable. This pdftoraster filter replaces the one shipped with Ghostscript and in addition to being much faster and more reliable with complex PDFs it implements CUPS' ICC profile support as described in the documentation:
> 
> http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/spec-ppd.html#cupsICCProfile
> http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/spec-raster.html#TABLE2
> http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/raster-driver.html#COLOR
> 
> Otani-san, am I correct that with this pdftoraster we have ICC-profile support for CUPS Raster drivers as described in the CUPS doc? How do I supply a rendering intent? Are there any additional non-PPD options to supply to print jobs?
> 
> Color management experts from OpenICC and driver developers, please test this feature and report your experience here. You could ship ICC profiles for installation in /usr/share/cups/profile/ to improve your printer's output quality.
> 
> Color management experts from OpenICC, WDYT about this color management effort? Is this already a step forward? Is it at least the correct effort for consumer-level printing? What needs to be added to support pro and prosumer printing?

Seems to me any pdftoraster filter needs to honor the PDF contents, not do extra things on its own. Or we run into trouble.

So if this pdftoraster honors ICCBased without substitution, that's good. If its implementation of CUPS ICC profile support means that it uses externally referenced profiles as the destination profile, that's fine *UNLESS* the PDF print spool file contains an OutputIntent in which case that needs to be used. So does pdftoraster support OutputIntent?

Chris Muprhy