Hi guys.
The above screenshot is that of the color-managed print dialog simulator that will be used throughout the Krita/libCmpx GSoC project. Although it is now ready for public viewing and testing, it does not do much at this point. It will eventually become a little more “smarter” throughout GSoC, as continued work on libCmpx will change the dialog’s behavior so that selecting a certain “ICC color profile” setting will correctly adjust the other settings.
Once this simulator becomes intelligent enough to automatically select ICC profiles and render print-ready PDF files, libCmpx will be ready for Krita.
I will soon be writing more posts related to this test dialog, since it provides an excellent vehicle in explaining in more detail how color-managed printing will work using libCmpx. What’s important to know right now is that the dialog actually uses a simulated “printer”, which contains special driver attributes that handle the color-related options normally seen in print dialogs. (The choices that you see below Color Settings were actually obtained from the printer driver.)
Feel free to play around with it – it is included along with libCmpx. The instructions to build the library and the test dialog can be found here
-Joe
Joe's Development Blog 
Hi Joe,
THANKS a lot indeed for your very interesting update 🙂
Just one dumb question: from what I have gathered reading your past blogs, it looks like your Gsoc project will be actually useful “only” for those users who work on Linux (I, for instance, work on Ubuntu 12.04, thus no problem for me).
Naturally, this is NOT a criticism (far from it) 🙂
Maybe, I am even wrong by writing this (to this purpose, bear with me, I am not a developer).
What about the “other” users (that is, the Windows ones), which are likely the majority fo the “potential” future Krita’s users?
At present, as you know, Krita 2.4 works on Windows as well.
Some Krita’s developers are pretty much commited to improve the current Windows installer.
If you take a look at the gallery, on the Krita’s web-site [1], there are more and more new artists that are popping up (and many of them work on Windows 7).
Is there some hope for them as well to take advantage of your promising work?
Have you already taken into account this “Windows” aspect too?
To sum up, it will be possible in the future to expand your work in order to accomodate it to work “more or less” fine on Windows as well?
To this end, I am thinking especially at the Windows – 64 bit platforms where a software like Krita could accomplish its best performance.
Anyway, thanks a lot indeed for you work! 😉
Please, keep us posted.
Best regards,
Silvio Grosso
[1] http://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=138&sid=5014de3e700915a498aa03f2f3e3b1ca
Hi Silvio,
Thank you for asking this question, which, by the way, is far from being a “dumb” one! Another person had commented in a previous post on the Windows aspect of an open-source, color-managed print workflow in Krita. So there is obviously a demand for this outside of Linux.
I will just say upfront that the project proposal that I wrote for this year’s Summer of Code was very specific for Linux. Most of the pieces in the library, which had been in development since last year, were already geared towards the ongoing efforts to build a color-managed print workflow in Linux. For GSoC, this kind of “readiness” is advantageous, since three months is actually a short time to get things done in a reasonable way.
With all that said, however, color management support for Krita in Windows will also be considered during the summer, and I, along with my mentor and some of the people at OpenICC, will see if a similar workflow can be leveraged for Windows.
In the meantime, the best way to see this project, I think, is simply as one step in the process. 🙂
It would be interesting to know if the PDF approach used in libCmpx suffices for printing on Windows. Perhaps a existing PDF interpreter like Ghostscript can be used to convert to a Windows native print format.
Hey Kai-Uwe,
Luckily, the Ghostscript interpreter API is suited for Windows as well, and such code in libCmpx can definitely be ported in that regard.
The issue is in handling the print format used specifically in Windows…
Hi Joe,
Joe Simon wrote:
> In the meantime, the best way to see this project, I think, is simply as one step in the process.
Yep. I totally agree!
Unfortunately, some Gsoc students fail their projects because three months are a very *short* amount of time to do every thing properly 😦
I have hinted a the Windows 64 bit platforms because I am 100% sure that, as soon as you finish your project, there will be plenty of Krita’s new users which, quite probably, are going to ask you why your print-management feature does not work for them as well 🙂
Thanks a bunch for your quick reply!
Best of luck for your work 🙂