[Openicc] Fwd: Settings bundles (Robert Krawitz, Edmund Ronald)

[Graeme Gill]

edmund ronald wrote:
> To coordinate the system color there will be some sort of central
> registry which associates color behavior (ICC profiles) for a given
> display or printer/media combination, and provides the user interface
> for modifying these associations when necessary. So Gutenprint needs
> to provide an interface to this color registry.

You mean Gutenprint needs to interface to this library, don't you ?
The library should provide it's own (programmatic) API,
and ideally the Operating environment (OS or Desktop) should
provide a user interface to the library so that users can see
what's going on, and organize their profiles. Gutenprint would
also use this library to figure out what profile to use.

> For the printer, inking settings and ICC profiles are indissociable. A
> profile is only valid under the conditions it was made.  At this point
> we have concluded that serializing the inking settings and exporting
> them to the system profile registry is the way to go.

Not correct. The practicalities (that there are too many combinations
of printers, inks, media and settings) mean that often it is better to use
a not-perfect matching profile rather than no profile at all, for similar
media and/or settings.

Add in calibration, and it's even less correct. You can get very reasonable
results in many situations by using the a single profile with multiple
media/setting specific calibration files.

> settings format, especially when we create new printer drivers. We can
> expect to work with this format extensively when fine-tuning a
> printer/media combination, and so we expect that some graphics tools
> for ink-curves, linearisation etc will need to be written to
> facilitate work which was up to now done more painfully. Some of these
> tools will also build in Graeme Gill's Argyll package that allows
> access to measurement instrumentation.

An Argyll linearisation tool (printcal) and the resulting curves has been
available and have been used for some time. If you want to provide a facility
to import such curves into a printing system, or (better yet) use them
directly, it would not be hard to do so.

Graeme Gill.