[Openicc] Printing Plans GhostScript / sRGB / ICC

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday, March 02, 2011 03:10:49 PM Alastair M. Robinson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 02/03/11 21:23, Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:
> >> Asking Ghostscript to honor platform specific job ticket info, I
> >> think, will cause problems. These documents really need to be self
> >> defining, and make it easy to produce documentation for so people know
> >> how this stuff works. Simplification is very important here.
> > 
> > I want to second the last sentence. Ambiguity buys us only workarounds
> > upon workarounds. The job ticket info for a "no colour management" flag
> > is a additional path for the PDF standard specified one.
> 
> Surely it would be pdftoraster's job to honour the
> disabling-colour-management option (via a command-line option to
> GhostScript, which unless I'm mistaken, Michael has already agreed in
> principle to add)?  That keeps honouring the job ticket within CUPS's
> sphere.
> 
> As far as keeping it simple goes, what could be simpler than a simple
> toggle in the print dialog, between what amounts to "Make my colours
> pretty" and "leave my colours the hell alone?"

In fact this is the most likely short term solution in any case even if we can 
figure out a way to make it automatic it will likely require that the widget 
tool sets that are used to create the spool files be modified and this could 
take years.  

A user setable switch in the user land software (like the CPD) could be 
something that always defaults to  "Make my colours pretty" and must be set 
each time a user wants "leave my colours the hell alone" since the latter is 
used very rarely.  That is it should be setup so that a "normal user" can't 
set this and then end up wondering why he/she is getting bad results from that 
point on.  After all the "leave my colours the hell alone" option is for users 
that have an understanding of color management and at some point CM aware apps 
(GIMP, Krita, InkScape...) should be producing well formed PDF spool files.  
Also it should be OK for "leave my colours the hell alone" print jobs to fail 
if there are issues down stream like sending a DeviceRGB object to a printer 
set in CMYK mode or having more than one DeviceXXX type (IE. DeviceRGB and 
DeviceGary) in the PDF file.

Also keep in mind that the vast majority of apps currently produce bad PDF 
spool files in our context if they can produce any at all.  For those widget 
sets that don't produce PDF spool files we may be able to influence how these 
behave as this work is being done.

> 
> I think any solution based on second-guessing or requiring specific
> flavours of PDF is going to be way too fragile, unpredictable, and yes,
> ambiguous.
> 
> All the best
> --
> Alastair M. Robinson
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