[cups-devel] ICC profile support for PostScript printers?

Helge Blischke helgeblischke at web.de
Sun Aug 7 04:29:07 PDT 2016


> Am 06.08.2016 um 21:08 schrieb Alexey Galakhov <agalakhov at gmail.com>:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to get color profiles to work - again. This time my printer
> has native PostScript support. Digging in the source code of CUPS I did
> not find anything that could apply an *.icc file from cupsICCProfile to
> a PostScript. The ps2ps utility filter does not do that. Am I missing
> something?
> 
> Regards,
> Alexey

As far as I know, printers which speak PostScript natively have (or should have) built-in color profiles
with respect to the selected media type / media color. If the printer has a hard disk, custom ICC profiles
should be loadable by a printer specific utility (that may be a printer specific PostScript program which may use
proprietary operators not belonging to the standard PostScript language).

The only ICC support implemented with CUPS is the handling of special PPD keywords described in the 
section „CUPS PPD Extensions“ of the CUPS documentation, and – to my knowledge – evaluation of these keywords 
are only implemented for the xxxtoraster filters (cgpdftoraster, pdftoraster, pstoraster, gstoraster, …) which
transform PostScript of PDF to the cups-raster format.

If you need more, you’ll have to rewrite (or write a wrapper for) the stops filter which generates e.g. PostScript CRDs
from selected ICC profiles (using utilities like spice from the lcms2 package), but be aware that a lot of
PostScript rips implement proprietary routines for color management which are not (or only roughly) compatible
with CRDs, so I really cannot recommend this approach.

Helge




More information about the cups-devel mailing list