[Openicc] colormanaged print path - the big picture

[Richard Hughes]

On 8 May 2011 12:27, Jan-Peter Homann <homann at colormanagement.de> wrote:
> - offering a "one click install" for additional printer setups with
> integrated ICC-profil

I've dealt with one-click install before with my dealings with
PackageKit. The conclusion I came to was that one click install is
very difficult to get right, and probably impossible to do legally and
securely when not dealing with the distribution metadata directly.

> - offering robust opt-out for printing profiling testcharts

Is this a per-document opt out? I.e. do I expect to send a normal
document with color management, a testchart and then normal document
to the queue and expect it all to work correctly? At the moment, the
way colord does this is really designed for scanners and displays,
where we inhibit the device for the duration of the calibration. For
printers this works as long as the user does not try to print a
"normal" document when we're in inhibit "mode". If this needs to be
changed we can probably add an additional method for the ghostscript
and foomatic projects to use that pass document-specific hints. I'm
not sure if that's required yet.

> If the proposal would be realized, this would lead to a new class of
> printing application, wich can be used both as standard driver or normal
> users, but offering advanced features normally only available in
> professional RIP-solutions.

I'm still not sure 99.9999% of users will want this. GNOME is always
erring on the side of "just work, rather than showing options" and
it's probably no coincidence that I'm not super interested in the RIP
type stuff. I do understand it's important tho.

> In´m not a developer, but so far as I understand CUPS, GhostScript,
> Gutenprint and CPD now, central parts of the proposal could may be realised
> through the GoogleSocc CPD project during June.

I'm being a little cautions relying on the CPD being adopted before we
can color manage printers. Until KDE and GNOME have significant buy in
to CPD, I think it's a dangerous dependency to rely on for the promise
of a color managed printing system. I'm sure that statement that won't
make me super-popular with most of the people on this mailing list.
:-)

> People, which think a color manged printing path should be organized in a
> quite differnt way, should publish an alternative proposal at OpenICC.

I'm just packing for LGM, but hopefully I can write something up how I
think it should work from a colord point of view. What I'm going to
find hard is integrating the Gutenprint low level stuff into the high
level colord design. I think it's possible, but I need to talk to more
people before I suggest such a method. Hopefully LGM might be that
place.

Richard.