ICC colour profiles: FOGRA, GRACoL, SWOP and the PDF/A output intent

What a colour profile is, in one minute

Inside a document a colour is nothing but a handful of numbers. On their own those numbers say very little: the same ones are one red on your telephone, another red on the screen beside it, and a third red once the ink has dried on paper. A colour profile is the small file that says what those numbers are meant to look like in real life. Its full name is an ICC profile, after the body that settled how such a file is written.

A printing works knows which profile its presses are set to, and will give you its name if you ask for it. Put that file into your document and nobody down the line has to guess: the blue you chose is the blue that comes back.

A profile written into a document to say which device its colours were chosen for is called the output intent. That is the piece a printer looks for, and the piece the rules on documents kept for the long term insist on.

We hand you nobody else's profile, and that is the point

The engine carries one profile of its own, sRGB, the ordinary screen one, and it works that one out from its published definition rather than copying anybody's file. Every other profile in the world belongs to whoever measured the press or the screen it describes, and comes with their conditions attached. Handing you a folder of them would put somebody else's terms inside every document you ever make.

So there is no such folder in the box. You bring the profile your printing works gave you, the engine writes it into your document, and it travels with that document wherever the document goes. You are not held to a list we drew up: whatever your printer works to is what you work to.

26 profiles of the trade, taken right through

On 28 July 2026 the team took 26 of the profiles the trade actually uses, one at a time, and put each of them through the whole chain: read the profile and see how many inks or colours it describes, set it on a document as its output intent, write the document as a PDF/A-3, then open that document again and check the profile really is inside it, whole, with the number of components it started with.

Every document that came out was then handed to veraPDF, the free checker archives use. It knows nothing about what wrote the file in front of it, and answers pass or fail. 23 of the 26 passed.

The 23 that are accepted

Each of these went in, came back out whole, and the document it produced was passed by the checker.

European presses — FOGRA27, FOGRA28, FOGRA29, FOGRA39, PSO Coated v3 (FOGRA51), PSO Uncoated v3 (FOGRA52), PSO SC-B Paper v3 (FOGRA54), eciCMYK v2 (FOGRA59)
North American presses — GRACoL 2006 Coated, SWOP 2006 grade 3, SWOP 2006 grade 5, US Web Coated (SWOP), US Web Uncoated
Japanese presses — Japan Color 2001 Coated, Japan Color 2001 Uncoated, Japan Color 2002 Newspaper, Japan Color 2003 Web Coated, Japan Web Coated
Screens — Adobe RGB (1998), Apple RGB, ColorMatch RGB, SMPTE-C, PAL/SECAM

What else goes through, and what became of the files

The profiles Ghostscript installs go through as well, every one of them: its own four-colour, three-colour and grey settings, and the ones it keeps for PostScript.

Not one of those files stayed. Each was fetched, put through the check and deleted. Nothing belonging to anybody else went into the product, and nothing of the sort is shipped to you.

The 3 that are refused, and why refusing is the right answer

Three are turned away, and all three are camera profiles: the one for HD video, the one for NTSC video and the one for PAL video. They are not the PAL/SECAM screen profile listed above, which is accepted. There is nothing wrong with them. They describe a machine that reads colour — a camera, a scanner — rather than a machine that shows it to you or prints it.

The standard for documents kept for the long term, ISO 19005-3, asks in its clause 6.2.3 for the profile of a printer or of a screen. A reading machine's profile is neither, so a document resting on one is not the archival document it says it is.

Until 28 July 2026 the engine took those three without a word and produced a file no checker would accept. It now stops at once and says in plain words what the profile it was handed actually describes. A refusal you understand on the spot is worth a great deal more than a file that fails somewhere else, weeks later.

Check it yourself, on your own profiles

You do not have to take our word for any of this. The library comes with a small script, scripts/check_icc_compat.sh, which you point at a folder of profiles. It goes through them one by one and tells you, for each, whether it is taken and what it describes.

Where this shows up in your day

If your documents go to a printing works, this is the difference between a proof that comes back right the first time and one that comes back twice. If you keep documents for ten years, it is the difference between a file an archive takes and a file it sends back.

It costs nothing extra. It is the same engine, and it is in every offer.

See it on a finished document

A file that states the device its colours are meant for A sheet as it goes to the press What else a document kept for the long term has to carry

See the prices See the examples

Glossary

PDF/A: A PDF made to be readable in twenty years' time. Everything it needs is inside the file — the fonts, the colours, the description of what it is — so nothing it depends on can go missing later. Public bodies and archives ask for it by name.
veraPDF: A free program that checks whether a file really is what it claims to be, against the published rules. It is the tool archives use, so it is the one used here: a document is not called compliant because we say so, but because veraPDF passed it.
colour profile: A file that says what a colour actually looks like. Without one, the same red is one red on your screen and another on a press. A document meant for print carries the profile its colours were chosen against.
output intent: The colour profile written into a document to say which press or which screen its colours were chosen for. A printer reads it to know what the numbers in the file are meant to look like, and the rules on documents kept for the long term ask for one.
CMYK: The four inks a printing press lays down: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. A screen mixes light instead, so a document going to a press states its colours in inks, not in screen colours.

Where this information comes from

Every text below was read on July 27, 2026, and is linked here so you can read it yourself. Rules change and dates written into law get moved, so if you are reading this a long time after that day, go and look.

ISO 19005-3:2012 — Document management — Electronic document file format for long-term preservation — Part 3: Use of ISO 32000-1 with support for embedded files (PDF/A-3): International Organization for Standardization — October 2012
What we do about it: Its clause 6.2.3 is the one that says an output intent must be the profile of a printer or of a screen. That is the rule the engine applies when it turns a profile away, and it says so at the moment it does.
veraPDF documentation — Validation: Open Preservation Foundation and PDF Association
What we do about it: Every document the run produced went through it. We do not decide whether a profile is accepted in a compliant file; the checker does, and it knows nothing about what wrote the file.

The same colours, from your screen to the press