[sane-devel] Color profiles with SANE?

[abel deuring]

Rene Bartsch wrote:
[...]

> 
> I want to create some ICC-like profile with an IT8-target. But I want to
> put it in somewhere centralized in the backend or server. There are
> Linux and Windoze clients and some are only setup for a few hours, so I
> don't want to do much setup on the clients ...
> 

I'm afraid that you will not have much luck with the current Sane 
version. But I think that ICC profiles should be supported in Sane 2. 
(With littlecms (http://www.littlecms.com) we have a good LGPL-ed ICC 
library available, so we _can_ actually support ICC. And with Scarse - 
Scanner CAlibration ReaSonably Easy - http://www.scarse.org/ - there 
even a calibration tool under development.)

While most of the calibration stuff should be done in the frontend, I 
think that the backends should be able to provide the ICC profiles. The 
profiles are closely tied to a certain device, and, as Rene mentioned, 
it is not very convenient to configure a number of workstations in a 
network for the same scanner. And a backend could automatically select 
the right profile, when for example a transparency adapter is switched 
on or off. Film scanners might provide special profiles for different 
film types.

I don't think that we need some additional functions in the Sane API for 
this purpose -- it would probably be enough to define an additonal frame 
type, or even only to add something like a "well known mime type" for 
SANE_FRAME_MIME.

On the backend side, we would probably only need a little common library 
which reads an ICC file, packages the file contents as specified by the 
mime type and a function which can be called by sane_read to return the 
ICC data to the frontend.

Abel