On May 27, 2006, at 10:40 AM, Thetargos wrote:
Recently we had a discussion in the Fedora Marketing mailing list about color management and accuracy in Inkscape, and this discussion touched several topics like the lack of true CMYK support, not Inkscape's fault, but the format's; and other color accuracy topics including color profiling with ICC and other stuff. By looking at the SVG site over at the www.w3c.org site, I noticed there was a proposed spec for SVG for printing, which would be called SVGP, and if I understood correctly it would be a subset of SVG 1.2 spec with some additional features with printed media specifically in mind. My questions to the list, actually is if this is going to be supported by Inkscape, and if the developers know a time frame when we could expect to have the first implementation of the spec?
Well, the biggest problem is that there is nothing to base work on.
There was a draft of 1.2 posted over a year and a half ago, but that had since been pulled back and shifted to have a placeholder instead.
So I think the key to things is the W3C and when they get the official release of the SVG 1.2 spec. You won't really see an implementation of it until there's an "it" to implement.
And as for how long after they release the spec before you see an implementation... well that all depends on how much they change things. If it's not changed much, things will be implemented much sooner. However, if they have made any significant changes since pulling the last draft, then it might take a while to redo a lot of the things we already have underway.
In the mean time, what method do you recommend for producing printed material off Inkscape's designs? Being that currently there is no conversion table or color management with ICC (or not that I am aware of) and the issue of color accuracy, which is a major problem for a lot of people. Some one over the mailing list proposed EPS and PDF, but if further manipulation is required, how can these formats be easily manipulated? Unless you had the original SVG that originated these other files it would be impossible... Anyhow, how are people making printed materials with Inkscape doing it?
Actually... this is changing at the moment.
Base CM support has started to be introduced in the upcoming 0.44 release, using LittleCMS to get base support of the <color-profile> element and the color-profile attribute on <image> elements. This now allows the standard test suite case "color-prof-01-f" for profiles to work
Moving forward, there will be a a lot of work in this area as soon as 0.44 is released. Support of ICC-Color, named colors, target profiles, etc.
However, for current day work, SVG is *supposed* to be treated as sRGB (a well known profile). Using that as a base, many people have then used Scribus for the detailed "going to print" work.