[Openicc] Synchronizing printer driver settings and printer profiles

[Richard Hughes]

On 11 January 2012 15:45, Jan-Peter Homann <homann at colormanagement.de> wrote:
> E.g. would it possible, that e.g. a vendor for inkjet media could create a
> set of an ICC-profile and a driver setting, which he offers for download
> from his website, and which the enduser can import into colord ?

I think that's too complicated. Lets say in an ideal world, the
printer vendor cares about providing some good ICC profiles with their
hardware. For example, Epson have two .icc profiles for a model, one
for glossy paper, one for plain paper. If they include the following
metadata in the ICC profile DICT tag:

MAPPING_format=ColorModel.OutputMode.OutputResolution
MAPPING_qualifier=RGB.Plain.*

Then just clicking on the profile and installing it on the system
would make the profile be selected for plain paper if the profile is
associated with a specific printer. This is how the
gnome-color-manager calibration program will produce profiles for
printers that have the correct MAPPING data encoded in them so we
don't have to ask the user what paper type a profile corresponds to.

Of course, the other side of the problem is mapping the profile to the
device automatically, which we can already do if the ICC profile is
referenced in the printer PPD file. It uses the same MAPPING_format
and MAPPING_qualifier formatting and logic, although it's fair to say
the number of PPD files that reference ICC files is tiny.

It would certainly be possible to add this kind of metadata into the
profiles as well (MAPPING_device_id?) but is not currently
implemented. It wouldn't be much work to add.

Richard.