[texworks] Wishlist for pdf previewer

[Paul A Norman]

On 1 November 2011 08:20, Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Hi,
>
>
> On 2011-10-28 02:23, Paul A Norman wrote:
>
>  Thanks Stefan sorry for the delay been very busy. Its used when  needing
> to check colour use in text, graphs, graphics and illustrations
> for indication of the result of grey-scale printing (sometimes inaccurately
> called black and white printing) - invaluable to be able to preview on
> screen without a printout. Means that any colours that are too close
> when viewed in greyscale, can be colour adjusted during editing.
>
>  Its already in the pdfview.exe (MUPDF a lightweight PDF and XPS viewer) project
> (Atrifex Software Inc) http://www.mupdf.com/ and very effective there.
> It is activated in their viewer, like everything else they do, by a
> keyboard key, c (information in info.txt - does not appear in the Help
> About box)
>
>
> Thanks for the info. Indeed, I used it (the info, and MuPDF) just today to
> check if some figures work reasonably well in grayscale.
>
> I've also added this to the pdf viewer wishlist. The one concern I have
> about this is that doing it right is far from trivial. As BPJ suggested,
> the only "proper" way of doing this is to do proper color management. This
> is far beyond the scope for now, so we'd have to settle for some
> approximation (which MuPDF most likely does internally, too). But I guess
> that should be doable.
>

I am not sure that the complications/complexities of entering the world of
proper colour management is worth the result, where I feel that all we are
probably actually looking for is an indication of likely outcomes so
that colours producing likely grey scale conflicts can be adjusted in
editing?

In the still being developed TeXworks insert colour dialogue, I have a few
simple algorithms begged, borrowed, adjusted (but not stolen), one
of which renders RGB to grey-scale well enough for most purposes (I think I
adjusted it to recommendations in Uwe Kern's Xcolor package documentation).

As the screens are nearly all effectively RGB something as simple as that
may help on a Qt area draw routines perhaps?
http://twscript.paulanorman.com/downloads/?InsertColour

May be if deemed necessary, CMYK workflow could be detected in the
document's  xcolor or other package settings? But if someone is working
towards CMYK output, then they are not seeing their colours on screen in
the pdf properly any way? Or are there screens/graphic-drivers out there
that have that degree of colour management?

Something is nagging the back of my mind that Qt has some sort of
draw/paint routine *convertToGrayScale*

Paul


> -Stefan
>
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