[Openicc] current CUPS printer color management in distributions.

[Till Kamppeter]

On 01/29/2012 06:38 PM, edmund ronald wrote:
> Richard, Till, Kai-Uwe
>
>   I'm trying to pull together an understanding of  the color management
> pieces in distributions with the aim of getting some color managed
> printing running *now* with Gutenprint.
>   What I see is that it is not pie-in-the-sky, byt should work with
> current distributions and current Gutenprint.
>
>   If I understand rightly, at the moment Ubuntu has a CUPS print system
> which will understand the cupsicccolor and effect conversions as
> determined means of the "*cupsiccprofile" keyword in PPDs,  as
> introduced originally on the Mac, while on RedHat things work
> differently by means of colord.
>

Yes, current Ubuntu (11.10 and later) supports the "*cupsiccprofile" 
keyword in PPDs, but only for CUPS Raster drivers (like Gutenprint) as 
jobs get rendered then by Ghostscript 9.04 wrapped by the gstoraster 
filter which reads out the "*cupsiccprofile" lines and adds the correct 
ICC profile to the Ghostscript command line, so that Ghostscript does 
the appropriate color conversion.

colord is also available in Ubuntu, it allows overriding the PPD-defined 
profiles with profiles which the user supplies via the color profile 
manager in the GNOME system settings. Usually users do not do this and 
so (if the printer driver ships color profiles) print-queue assigned 
profiles should allow out-of-the-bos color correctness.

Main problems are:

- Up to now no driver ships color profiles
- "*cupsiccprofile" (and colord) support is only there for CUPS Raster 
drivers, not for native PostScript printers or foomatic-rip-based drivers.

    Till