No subject

will not be colour converted remotely.

(Btw. can the PDF/X (A/E) specs be publically downloaded?)

> this means that the app creating the PDF needs to be not only aware of color
> but also needs to knwo what printer is being targeted and how to get it's
> default profile for the print mode being used.

And that is a real burden to implement. From what I see with the current 
approach to bypass CUPS for communicating the ICC profile thats eigther 
weak done or becomes a hughe pice of work for doing it properly.

For a remote configured ICC profile we could live without a preview. For a 
local profile to be sent to a remote printing host the OutputIntent would 
be very convenient.

> The basic issue always come back to the fact that most of the apps on peoples
> machines are producing malformed PDF files that by default use DeviceXXX and do
> not set the OutputIntent.  If we were following the PDF spec. and DeviceXXX
> data would be passed through to the printer unchanged with unpredictable
> results for many apps.  In addition, if the DeviceXXX objects did not match
> the color mode of the printer (IE. DeviceRGB but printer is a CMYK only or is
> set to CMYK in CUPS) or if the PDF has more than one DeviceXXX type (like
> DeviceRGB and DeviceGray which is possible with the current Qt PDF code) then
> the print job would fail.  The problems is users expect stuff to "just work"
> and following the specification will fail for some number of print jobs with
> most software currently being used.  This means that we need to do things like
> get the Qt PDF code fixed to be inline with the PDF specification and work at
> getting good PDF code into other libraries that support printing like GTK+.
> This is going to take some effort.

I assume that weak expressed PDF files can be converted to some flat 
colour space with Ghostscript or Poppler? How many work would it be to 
convert DeviceRGB to ICCbased?
User configured profiles can then be injected in the OutputIntent.

kind regards
Kai-Uwe Behrmann
-- 
developing for colour management 
www.behrmann.name + www.oyranos.org