[Openicc] Print-Color-Pipeline: Learning from TurboPrint and Photoprint

[Robert Krawitz]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2011 10:58:13 +0100, Jan-Peter Homann wrote:

> As written in my concept for colormanagement under LINUX at the
> OpenICC wiki, a faster implementation would be succesful, if we
> concentrate in the first step on flat color documents. This would
> deliver ICC based color management workflows for following use
> cases:

...

> How could this implemented step by step ?
>
> 1) We need a combination of a printer driver which allows to create
> settings to which a printer ICC-profile will be assigned

Here's what I'm thinking as a first step (for Gutenprint/CUPS).

We would make available PPD files with features affecting color
elided.  This would give users control over only non-color related
features.  The PPD file would also contain settings for the
color-related features encoded somehow (whether the encoding is JSON,
XML, or anything else doesn't matter from an architectural
standpoint), along with a key referring to the correct ICC profile.

> 2) We need a bitmap based filter for ICC based color transformations
> combined with the printer driver. ICC based bitmap conversion is a
> standard functionality of littleCMS

As you noted, PhotoPrint effectively does this for a limited set of
workflows.