Creating printer profiles

A few months ago, I started working on gnome-color-manager. Now, making a display profile using an external calibration device is as simple as a few clicks and a few minutes of waiting. Quite a few people are keen on me working on printer calibration next, and to properly support spectrophotometers. This means you could generate print profiles with a few clicks of the mouse, just like display profile.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a spectrophotometer, and without hardware it’s pretty hard to add support. The devices are also quite expensive, and not something I can expense with Red Hat (they are kind enough to allow me to work on gnome-color-manager in work time as it is!) Generously, the guys on the gnome-color-manager list have put together a collection. If we can get close to the £320 total, then I can buy a device of my own and add support to gnome-color-manager and work on the upstream CUPS support.

If you’re interested in us achieving this goal, and you’ve got a few quid spare, I would be very grateful. We’ve already got £145 towards the total. Any donations gratefully accepted. If we get close enough, I’ll bite the bullet and convince my wife I need to spend some money on “work stuff”. Thanks.

EDIT: total reached! Many thanks to you all!

Published by

hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

8 thoughts on “Creating printer profiles”

  1. Why don’t you ask a hardware maker for that hardware? I’m pretty sure that we can find you some contacts at one of the companies that has Linux printer support.

  4. Helping with this is so much in the job description of your employer, and other “business” related entities like the Linux Foundation. Red Hat surely must have a hw vendors contact path, be it directly of via the Linux foundation.

    I’ve always believed you had a internal phone book entry “I need some hw to help me develop this piece of software that we might be selling support for in the near future”

    1. Sure, but Red Had doesn’t have any interest in me writing GCM. It’s unlikely to sell them more copies of RHEL, although it’s probably something we need if we want to stay competitive with OSX. Your comment about the Linux foundation is a good one, and one I will follow that up, thanks.

  5. @Bastien

    ColorMunki is created by X-Rite that earlier acquired Pantone and GretagMacbeth. None of the three companies like Linux and none of them are prepared to work with us.

Comments are closed.