[Scribus] Re: Can't get colour management working

[Steve deRosier]

PLinnell wrote:
> On Thursday 21 April 2005 16:24, Asif Lodhi wrote:
...sniped...
> 
> You are more than likely missing cmyk profiles. Those listed are a 
> mixture of generic and special profiles included with littlecms
> 
> There are links for CMYK profiles on the wiki, www.scribus.net and on 
> docs.scribus.net. We cannot ship them because of licensing.
> 
> These are the generic Adobe print profiles and installing them 
> correctly will enable color management.
> 

This seems a very common problem (I ran into it to when I started with Scribus).  I think the real problem is a usablity problem that stems from Scribus silently disabling the Color management menu item if you don't have at least one each of the RGB and CYMK profiles installed.  It makes it look like the color management is just disabled/broken without any input to the user of why.

My sugestion, since we can't include the profiles due to license issues.  If cms is enabled (ie support is compiled in) don't disable the menu item.  If it can't find the profiles, when the user clicks on it give a message box (sample text, don't nit-pick please):
! "Can't find profiles.  To enable CMS support, please install icc profiles in /usr/local/scribus/profiles.  Please see the wiki for further instructions."

Now the user knows:
1. CMS support is installed and should work.
2. Exactly what is wrong.
3. Where to look for more help if they need it.

If CMS support isn't complied in, don't even show the menu item (maybe it does that...I always enable it).


Even better, we might want to construct our own profiles that we can ship (easier said then done?) and automatically install so that things just work.

- Steve