On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 10:36, David Christian Berg wrote:
There's a feature request for cmyk and spot colors somewhere in the bug tracker. However, if you guys could spend some thoughts on how it might be implemented in inkscape that'd be cool.
Now since the native format of svg just is rgb, I wonder (as I did in the bug tracker) if it is possible to define the colors used in the defs and add a cmyk equivalent in a inkscape tag. The user would manipulate the cmyk equivalent and inkscape would recaculate the rgb value... something like that.
I think the right way to do CYMK and possibly spot colors is to implement support for ICC color profiles. They're part of the SVG standard, and use would basically look something like this:
fill:#ff0000 icc-color(genericCYMK, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0);
i.e. after the normal color specification, SVG permits an icc-color() which can specify a color in an arbitrary ICC color profile. This works pretty much anywhere in SVG that you can specify a color.
The catch is that you can't really just say "CYMK" any more than you can "RGB" -- there are many CYMK color profiles, just as there are many RGB color profiles (at least for RGB, SVG specifically specifies sRGB).
I don't know what a good real standard CYMK color profile ("genericCYMK" is just a placeholder) would be.
We might also be able to cope with spot colors in that way, giving each spot color its own ICC profile or something. Not sure what the best course of action there would be.
In any case, note also that the as yet unfinalized SVG 1.2 is expected to have some additional support for CYMK and spot colors, but I've not had time to look into the specifics yet.
-mental