[Openicc] GoSoC 2011: CPD and target printing

[Chris Murphy]

On May 12, 2011, at 10:34 AM, Michael Sweet wrote:

> On May 12, 2011, at 3:21 AM, edmund ronald wrote:
>> 1. I do agree with Chris that not being able to "disable" color
>> management (eg. for targets) on OS Xhas really created considerable
>> user pain and this needs fixingI think every app, including Preview
>> should be able to print targets.
> 
> There seems little point when you need an app to generate the target image and interpret it anyways.

That's not how profiling applications have worked, historically. They came with pre-built targets, and the apps have functioned on a legacy of opt-in color management so an app to print the target wasn't needed.

With the advent of opt out color management, Apple very ridiculously failed to provide either an application for printing these targets reliably, and also to provide key developers with a reliable, documented, or publicly available means of opting out for the purpose of printing targets and printing prematched images. Both of these were necessary from the beginning once an opt-out system was implemented.

My primary suggestion is that we don't need more UI in print dialogs, things should just work. The use case isn't there so long as there is a utility and API that are reliable and freely available. But Apple has provided neither. Instead there is a private SPI that has largely been denied to exist until very recently, still is private, undocumented, and not locatable on the dev web site, and one which doesn't actually ensure ColorSync's transforms are disabled. And on top of it, Apple deferred to Adobe to create the utility for printing profile targets. I find that quite inappropriate to kick the can of responsibility down the road to some 3rd party who has no control over the SPI on which the utility depends.

So regardless of verbal intentions, the actions to me demonstrate something between disinterest and hostility toward ICC based workflows that require custom profile generation and usage without ColorSync.

Although things should "just work" and we shouldn't need more UI in every print dialog, given that the Mac OS X print dialog already has a pop-up menu to manually choose an ICC profile, including a "ColorSync Disabled" option in that pop-up menu to choose instead of Automatic or another ICC profile, doesn't seem out of scope or particularly controversial. And the same applies to Linux, if an opt-out color management system is going to be developed.


Chris Murphy