Ubuntu
ghostscript package

Color print out with pxlcolor very distorted

Bug #510832 reported by jhoechtl on 2010-01-21

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #505423: pxlcolor problem when printing characters after color change. Edit Remove

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	ghostscript (Ubuntu)	Incomplete	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: ghostscript

There is not much to say here ... color print outs using pxlcolor PCL6 are distorted to the point of beeing useless. I don't know according to which algorithm an rgb to cmyk conversion is made but

* the conversion values taken are not sensible
* some colors are entirely wrong

Do the developers acutualy eat their own dog food?

Here is the detailed report:

Print out the file at http://www.fho-emden.de/~hoffmann/a3gencolorhigh.pdf on any recently new color laser printer using windows XP, Vista or 7 using a PCL6 driver. I happen to have a Samsung CLP 610ND

Print out the same file using the ghostscript pxlcolor driver included with (K)Ubuntu 9.10, ie. ghostscript: gs -v
GPL Ghostscript 8.70 (2009-07-31)
Copyright (C) 2009 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

The actually used color printer is not so important. I tried it on three different models and the failures are the same:

* Lienar BW Gradients on screen appear no longer lienear (they do when using a Windows driver)
* In color gradient tables, sometimes adjacent colors, which according to the nature of a gradient should be similar, are of entirely different color or even black
* If I happen to choose a color to do some artisitc work which happens to be eroneously converted into the PCL language, i waste amounts of paper, trees, time and ressources

Expected results: Things just work! This is not rocket science!