The embedded ICC profile

This entry is a download, not a page to look at. A file meant for archiving is obliged to carry a colour profile describing the device its colours are meant for, and the usual answer is to ship somebody else's: a hundred kilobytes or more, with a licence attached, copied into every document you ever produce.

The library's own tests say what they can prove: the profile it builds is well formed, and reads back exactly as it was written. The further question — whether specialist colour software agrees that this is a true sRGB profile — is settled by handing that software the file itself, and this download is the file. It comes out of the library alone: an application sends the server a description over the network and receives a PDF, so no request creates this profile as a file of its own. A profile travels the other way, supplied with the call — for the document's output intent, for one page's own, for a declared colour space, for the colours of a picture — and a document written for archiving that names none receives this very profile, inside the file.

What this example shows

  • A complete sRGB profile built by the library, not shipped with it.
  • The profile every PDF/A file gets when none is named.
  • A download rather than a page: inspect it with specialist software. The library alone writes it, and no request to the server hands it back.

The source code, complete

Nothing is left out and nothing is simplified: this is the program exactly as it runs, for the developer who uses this library.

Read the Rust source Read the Python source

This sample is a colour profile, not a page. Download it to inspect it.

Download ICC profile

Examples near this one

Grey, screen and printing colours

Swatches in each of the three ways to say a colour — a grey as one number, a screen colour as three, a printing colour as four inks — each captioned with the instruction actually written into the file, and one mid-grey said three ways.

Colour the document defines

The same six colours said as bare numbers and then read through the screen profile the file carries, plus a ramp from light to dark and a sweep of measured hues: colour that still means the same thing on another screen and on a press.

Several plates at once, each at its own strength

Eight choices of plate among the four usual inks, each with the small program that shows it printed underneath, and two inks the press carries itself used together, every strength of one against every strength of the other.

A colour chart the drawing points into

A chart of house colours the file carries, and a drawing whose sixteen numbers are places in that chart rather than colours. The same drawing is shown twice through two charts: repainting a whole brand is one chart, not every drawing.

One hatch, laid down in any colour you like

One pattern that states no colour of its own, laid down in five colours and in five strengths of one press ink: the fill says what colour to lay it down in. Beside them, the same hatch made of patterns that carry their own colours, which is one pattern per colour.

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