[tex-live] ICC profiles for PDF/A compliance

[Peter Selinger]

I think the file (whichever one) should be included with pdfx,
typically in the same directory as the other pdfx files. Each
candidate RGB profile is less than 10 kilobytes (the Ghostscript one
is 2576 bytes in size, and the /usr/share/color one has 6922 bytes),
so there is very little to be gained by not duplicating the file.

As to which profile to include: I don't think it matters much.  Any
user who cares about precise print color specifications can provide
and include their own color profile, using e.g. the
\setRGBcolorprofile or \setCMYKcolorprofile commands provided by the
pdfx package.

The point of providing a default profile is to make life easy to the
rest of the users (presumably the majority) who don't care that much
about professional quality color. Most TeX documents are
black-and-white, with perhaps a few HTML colors like \color{red}
thrown in. They will look okay no matter which profile is used. 

Moreover, as I understand it, RGB profiles are not really meant for
professional use (most professional printers will prefer CMYK
colors). Rather, the point of RGB profiles is to allow users to print
something that "looks reasonably similar to what they see on the
screen". The differences between various commonly-used RGB profiles
are probably quite negligible and I would not worry about it too much.

-- Peter

Norbert Preining wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> On Sun, 09 Sep 2018, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> > So if we don't find an ICC sRGB profile with an appropriate license we
> > can create one ourselves with a license which makes everybody happy.
> 
> As far as *I* remember this is not a trivial task.
> 
> > For the time being, Norbert, could you add the file
> >   sRGB_IEC61966-2-1_black_scaled.icc
> > to tlcontrib if you haven't done this already?
> 
> And where should it be installed? Into the pdfx directory or 
> 	texmf-dist/tex/generic/icc
> maybe?
> 
> On Mon, 10 Sep 2018, Ross Moore wrote:
> > But there is one aspect of this that I don’t have the expertise in color usage to decide.
> > How different are the various profiles?
> > What is the difference between them? Does it matter?
> > If we make a choice, then there should be a reason for it, concerning the actual
> > colour output, either on-screen or when printed with different devices.
> 
> I think this is an important question and one that *I* cannot answer,
> but I guess it makes lot of difference. I used icc profiles paired with
> calibrated targets to color-correct slides I have scanned. Without it
> the scan wasn't really nice at times.
> 
> All the best
> 
> Norbert
> 
> --
> PREINING Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
> Accelia Inc.     +    JAIST     +    TeX Live     +    Debian Developer
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