colord rejects printer .ICC color profile

[Oliver]

Hi,

At work I have access to an expensive professional photo spectrometer to calibrate input and output devices in terms of color, Gretag Macbeth (now X-Rite) Spectrolino and Spectroscan, and i1 (Eye One).

I have profiled my monitors (currently either Dell P2210 or Samsung SyncMaster 950p+) with them, and the monitor .ICC works perfectly well not only under Windows, but also under Linux Mint 16 Petra 64 Bit (all updates are installed).

But not so the printer profile. No matter whether I try to import the ICC for the printer (trusty old HP Laserjet 4P) that I have created from a print under Linux or the one I have created from a print under Windows, colord rejects them with the cryptic error message "invalid UTF-8". This happens when I start "color" over the "settings" dialog panel.

When I try to import the ICC with right click on the file and select "import with ICC profile installation" a couple of seconds nothing happens, then I get the even stranger error message "File could not be imported / The profile was not added in time".

Again, gthe .ICC itself is pefectly sane and works flawlessly under Windows 7 and 8.1. I created it with the professional software "Profile Maker 5" from Gretag Macbeth.

Thanks for your help.
Oliver

[Oliver (ok23)]

Hi,
further experimenting brought interesting results:

1) the error message "invalid UTF-8" can directly be provoked. It came out of a feature of the Gretag-Macbeth Profile Maker software. Profile Maker takes note of how you name the .ICC file, because this may contain information about the name of the device measured. So Profile Maker makes a note inside the .ICC file about the file name. And at first I chose a file name to indicate that the test print was rendered on plain white paper (instead of recycled paper, which is standard in our office). In German white is "weiß", with what Americans sometimes call "the b looking character", actually it is a ligature of s and z. In the early days of ASCII it was often represented by the Greek beta glyph, but that has never been correct, it's a version of the s, Swiss people transcribe it as double-s.

Anyhow, as a file name Windows encoded this in Western codepage, of course, and not in UTF-8. Profile Maker just copied this into a string variable that might be encoded in UTF-8 without a conversion.

I created new .ICC profiles without the ß in the file name (and therefore without it in this string inside the file), and now the file does import without error messages. No "invalid UTF-8" anymore, and no timeout. Still, importing takes a loong time (10-12 seconds on a fast quadcore machine), but after that, a copy lands in ~/.local/share/icc/colord and second import attempts yield the message "already imported". So far so good.

I think colord should be more tolerant her, since it's only a string containing a name. Windows doesn't complain, it even shows the string correctly.

2) But that's about it. I cannot add the imported profile to the device listing of the HP Laserjet 4P, color manager only lists the standard Grey profile, since this Laserjet is a greyscale device, and not the imported profile. And since it gets neither listed nor added nor activated, the .ICC is not used at all.

I found that Gretag-Macbeth can create to types of profiles, .ICC with "default size" and "large size". Since an ECI2002V CMYK test pattern contains 1485 color test colors, I usually create large files, for the sake of precision. Now I tried to create default sized ones. I can import them in color manager, but then the same as above. I cannot activate them although they are imported.

If I open the file with the import manager and let it show the details, it shows only the checksum and the fact that it's an output device's file and CMYK. Everything else is missing, like color gamut, CIE 1931, TRC, VCGT and a rendering preview.

I attach the default sized version of the .ICC to this report.

Thanks
Oliver