[Openicc] Printing Plans ... PPD color options

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 5, 2011, at 4:31 AM, Jan-Peter Homann wrote:
> 
> Stripping off the "make my colors worse" option lead to following PPD
> 
>    Image RGB Intent:    Business *Picture
>    Text RGB Intent:     *Business Picture
>    Graphics RGB Intent: *Business Picture

All of these settings in the PPD enable CSAs and CRDs to be used inside the printer. If they are used we get both ICC color management by Ghostscript and PostScript color management by the PPD and the printer. Who knows what happens if Ghostcript converts ICC into CSAs and CRDs and drops those into a PostScript stream and the user uses any of these 20 year old legacy "features". It's probably different per printer.

I really think these native PostScript printers are on their own unless there are dual PPDs. New PPDs for ICC color managed workflows and PPDs for legacy workflows (the current ones). I don't see how they get married and not cause problems. I would not be surprised if PCL printers have similar issues, it's from that same era.

And is this Business intent vs Picture intent the same thing as Saturation vs Perceptual intent?

I think it's not unreasonable to draw a line and say: for native PostScript (possibly also PCL) printers all tagged RGB is converted to sRGB, all tagged CMYK is converted to SWOP, and then the data is sent to the device without any CSA's or CRD's and let the internals (and the print dialog PPD options) decide the fate of the job. If people want to do a dance with a dog, a pig, and a pony under a full moon to get better prints, they can still profile it and push 18 buttons to make it happen.

For raster devices, move forward with something a little smarter.


Chris