Miscellaneous
In this section I'll place any software projects that I consider worth sharing, but which don't warrant sections to themselves.
CUPS Test Rig
2011-03-18
It was recently announced that the next version of Ubuntu would feature a colour-management-capable pdftoraster filter, based on Poppler. I wanted to find out more about this, and give it a spin to see how it works, and since for another project I've been learning how to create live ISO images, I created a simple live image from the current Ubuntu Natty repos. This live installation features a virtual CUPS printer that generates images from submitted jobs, and a web server through which you can view the results.
ISO image
Read more...
RasterToTiff 0.1.0
2011-03-18
RasterToTiff is a CUPS filter intended to aid in the development of a colour-managed printing chain. To save on ink, you can set up a dummy printer that uses rastertotiff, and instead of printing the result, it saves the result off for on-screen inspection.
By default it saves the generated images in /var/www/spool - the idea being that you can view the results with a web browser.
Source code - .tar.gz
(The source package probably seems massive for such a simple tool - that's because I've just taken the framework around which PhotoPrint and CMYKTool are built, and hastily written this tool against it.)
As well as the source to rastertotiff, the package also contains a "null" backend for CUPS, and a few ICC profiles that give obvious and distinct results, for debugging purposes, and an example PPD file.
As always, this is experimental software. There's no documenation as such, but do get in touch if you want to make use of it but are stuck. I will shortly publish a live ISO image that can be used to try rastertotiff (and colour-management within CUPS in general) without having to worry about installation or configuration.
