Pages resolution, dpi, RGB, CMYK

Is there anyone responsible at Apple that we can talk to?

In traditional terms, this is a problem for the technical press. Of course, the technical press has the political problem that it has Apple as advertiser, and sooner rather than later it will have Apple as distributor, too. Still, where there's a will there's (usually) a way.

/hh

PeterBreis0807 wrote:
Is there anyone responsible at Apple that we can talk to?

That may the exact problem: there is no one at Apple responsible for making ColorSync work, so nothing happens.

Several of us have had at least occasional exchanges directly with Apple's developers in different areas - not that we necessarily are supposed to talk about them in public. When it comes to ColorSync, I certainly have not had any direct contact with them. You clearly have not, and that surprises me. You know what you are talking about, and if there had been anyone sensible responsible for ColorSync, they would have contacted you for more information.

Conclusion - ColorSync is a lonely raft left to its fate on a wide ocean.

I hope I am wrong, of course. Luckily I am often wrong. But I do not have that warm an fuzzy feeling about ColorSync.

there is no one at Apple responsible for making ColorSync work, so nothing happens.

There is a team and the people in the team have maintainence tasks and development tasks. They track these tasks from the discussions on the ColorSync Users List and the ICC list at www.color.org just as the text font team tracks its tasks from the Unicode list, the Typophile list, the OpenType list and more. The trouble is that on the one hand, improving the UI aggrevates Adobe, and on the other hand, improving the UI triggers a torrent of posts that pressure for this or that direction of development. As explained previously, for instance, there is a fraction that wants support for device dependent PDF/X-1 (Jan-Peter Homann, for instance), another fraction wants support for multiple OutputIntents at the same time (Bruce Fraser and Chris Murphy, for instance), another fraction wants support for deviceLinks (Jan-Peter, Bruce and Chris) and so on and so forth. Same on the Unicode list: some want PUA drawing, some want decomposed Combining Diacritic drawing, and so forth. Not one of these posts on ICC imaging and Unicode imaging discuss how document markups and document masters may be searchable in blind exchange with these drawing proposals. So, to be fair, it's not so simple since the web is a free forum for people with a bee in their bonnet.

What is worse, the tagged ICC file format and the tagged TrueType/OpenType format is ignored in PostScript level 1, level 2, and level 3. Period. To spool a PostScript stream, the tags of the ICC file format are subset and the intact profile does not survive in PDF from Distiller - it is in part reconstructed by populating the missing five tags with the blocks of numbers in the sixth tag that is taken from the source profile. PDF 1.3 is the first version of PDF to support the tagged ICC file format. TrueType (Apple's trademark for the tagged SFNT file format) and OpenType (Microsoft's trademark for the tagged SFNT file format) is stripped for the semantic tables (CMAP, MORX, GSUB, GPOS) and the spline data table is subset (GLYF). This has been so since Adobe Technical Note 5089 in 1993, and the only information that survives is the Adobe font-independent glyph identifiers which were ISO 10036/AFII until 1998 and UTF16 after 1998. PDF 1.6 and higher supports the intact tags of the SFNT file format, but only with Microsoft supplements for composition above the CMAP.

In other words, you have the intelligent profile model of the International Color Consortium and the intelligent font model of the Unicode Consortium working with a document technology that processes neither. Jonathan Seybold warned of having a library of graphics primitives and a library of graphics commands in the host computer system which was not a superset of the graphics primitives and graphics commands in the document technology for the user RIP system.

ColorSync is a lonely raft left to its fate on a wide ocean.

No, that's not the trouble. See above.

not that we necessarily are supposed to talk about them in public

If you want to talk to them, you've been able to do so all along.

/hh

http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_23/printhints.html

may be searchable in blind exchange

Correction:

May be repurposable in blind exchange

/hh

This has been so since Adobe Technical Note 5089 in 1993

Corrigenda:

ATN 5012 is on the Type 42 font program format that strips the semantic tables and subsets the glyph data table

ATN 5089 is on glyph names as well for PostScript glyph data as for TrueType glyph data.

/hh